When adding extensibility to your vRealize Automation platform, it’s important to get the basics right first. All too often it’s tempting to rush off and build complex blueprints whilst forgetting about the building blocks of good infrastructure, like naming and IPAM. Here I’m going to demonstrate how I do custom naming for workloads in my environment. Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: VMware AppVolumes bug deletes SSL certificates on upgrade
Recently I upgraded my AppVolumes 2.18 and 4.0 installations to the latest version. The event log on each server showed the installation as successful, returning “code 0” accordingly. To add to this, all services started as you would expect.
Unfortunately, both applications Continue reading
Using GitLab CI/CD Pipelines to Automate your HashiCorp Packer Builds
A long time ago I decided I was done with manual builds, and that my desktop images had to be automated. I had a lot of success with that solution and wrote about it here.
Recently I made the decision to automate my server builds too, also using HashiCorp Packer. Whilst I used VMware Code Stream to Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Using Postman to authenticate to AWS
I’m currently working on a set of vRealize Automation blueprints that reach out to Amazon Web Services Route 53 during provisioning to create some DNS records. In true “bottom-up” programming methodology, I’m using the Postman API client to prove my concept works, before coding the solution in Javascript so it can be used in vRealize Orchestrator. Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Don’t let the NSX-T root password expire!
I’ve decided that whilst it’s great to provision a Kubernetes blueprint with a standard network overlay to the vRealize Automation catalog, offering one that leverages NSX-T is even better. So a few days ago I started creating Continue reading
Setting the vRA Software Agent to run as a different user
I’m currently working on a lab project which enables cloud consumers to request a full VMware Horizon environment straight from my vRealize Automation catalog. This will provision Connection Servers, a Composer server, UAGs – all load-balanced using VMware NSX. Exciting, but not without its challenges. The first being… Horizon wouldn’t install. Continue reading
Documenting vRealize Orchestrator Code with JSDoc and Confluence
Recently I’ve been working on improving HobbitCloud’s DevOps practices, specifically around committing code to version control and documenting it. Once a developer checks code in, this should compile, and if successful be deployed to the test environment. Once here it will undergo automated testing before progressing to staging for unit and integration tests. Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Cycling through XML in vRealize Orchestrator
A few months ago a client asked me to create an NSX application load-balancer programmatically, and then make it available to their vRealize Automation consumers in through the self-service catalog. In building-block fashion, they requested that this wasn’t a composite blueprint, but rather through XaaS. While the former would definitely take less time, the latter was not that difficult either once I got started. Continue reading
Securing VMware Horizon UAGs with Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates
Securing your Horizon Universal Access Gateway (UAG) with a genuine SSL certificate from a recognised vendor is an important process. It enables your users to be sure they’re connecting to the correct VDI infrastructure, and that the communications between their endpoint and remote desktop are secure. Continue reading
How not to lock yourself out of your Ubuntu 18.04 VDI desktop
Those that follow my adventures with EUC will probably be aware that I’m a huge fan of Linux on the VDI desktop. The cost benefits are self-evident for task and knowledge-based workers; and for power users like developers, the platform can provide an easier route to a lot of their applications. Continue reading
