Thursday, April 16, 2020
Synopsis
vCloud Director 10.1 (VCD) has recently been released from VMware, with this release comes some great new features and enhancements. Many of these are items that will greatly enhance our abilities as VCD administrators and allow our tenants through the UI to have a much easier time managing vApps and VMs, including Kubernetes (K8s) clusters, and get much needed features available like VM and disk encryption. Here are a few highlights from the release documents that are going to be major impact for my team.
Please note that as of right now VCD 10.1 does not support vSphere 7.0 or NSX-T 3.0. There will soon be a minor patch that will update VCD in order to allow that functionality.
[Read more...]
Thursday, August 1, 2019
Synopsis
VMware Skyline is a new product currently for premier partners. The product is installed as an appliance within an existing vCenter environment and can be tied into vCenter, NSX, Horizons, and vRealize Operations. It proactively examines the environments that it is tied into and reviews the configuration giving you detailed inventory views. These views have a couple of primary benefits, the first is the proactive findings tab which will give you detailed issues within your environment. These findings can include misconfigured devices, vulnerabilities, and missing settings, along other possible issues. The second major benefit is the ability to quickly send bundle logs to VMware. When you are working on an SR the engineer at VMware will send a request through the Skyline product, you simply have to approve the bundle and it will perform the function for you! That means no more manually pulling the bundles and uploading them to VMware’s website, this is a major time saver.
[Read more...]
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Synopsis
Replacing the SSL certificate inside a VMware Cloud Director V9.X (VCD) installation can be difficult. In this article I break down the procedure into easy to follow steps.
[Read more...]
Monday, May 6, 2019
Synopsis
This is a very long and detail guide on upgrading multiple aspects of a VMware installation including VMware vCenter 6.7, VMware Cloud Director (VCD), and NSX for vSphere (NSX-v). I did not break this up into different processes because each one was so dependent upon the other, so all of this was done in a single massive maintenance window.
[Read more...]
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Why a pihole?
PiHole is a easy slick solution for helping keep your home environment a little safer from various URLs out there. My personal implementation removes a plethora of bad URLs including spam, advertisement sites, porn, etc and attempts to keep my home more secure from bad websites. If your end users are even a little internet savey then they will find it easy to get around this but generally speaking most people won’t understand what is going on.
The PiHole is a quick install and runs on a Raspberry Pi, you configure it with various blacklist items and any DNS query for the bad URLs simply gets routed back to nothing. For example, lets say we don’t want to have any more advertisements from company ABC123.com. We log into the PiHole and blacklist ABC123.com, now any DNS queries to this URL will automatically be returned as nothing, so your device is no longer able to connect to the real website. You can do this with other DNS servers as well, I simply went with the PiHole because I wanted a fun project to do on my Raspberry Pi.
[Read more...]