I’m working on a project that requires direct interaction with the vRO API from a third party system. Maybe I’m getting less effective at using Google in my old age, but I had a heck of a time finding good solid code for authenticating to the API using anything, including PowerShell.
Typically I’d use Invoke-vRARestMethod from PowerVRA for this, but unfortunately I had some additional requirements that mandate me using a bearer token.
Packer, Photon, Python, Flask, WSGI, vROps. Holy smokes folks.. I’m not sure I could make a more click-bait-y post if I tried!
I recently took a position at a new company and had the opportunity to stand up a greenfield environment. Part of this environment was obviously configuring monitoring. Since we’re pretty heavily tied to VMware here, we’re using vROps for our monitoring. For escalation of alerts, we’re using OpsGenie, and for normal collaboration we’re using Teams. Unfortunately, vROps versions older than 8.4 do not support sending alerts to OpsGenie or Teams out of the box. Fortunately, we can still get this working with a bit of work.
In the first part of this series we went over Terraform at a very high level and discussed a basic example of using it to provision a single Windows VM or a single Linux VM. While this is a helpful baseline, it doesn’t realistically help us when defining our application structure in code. For example, if you wanted to set up a three tier application you’ll need to have three separate instances of the project we used. At that point we’re not really gaining much efficiency over deploying a template in vCenter. In this post I’ll discuss Terraform Modules, give an example of how to store your Terraform Module in GitHub, and provide a real-life example of how to deploy a three tier application using multiple source images.
With everything going on in the world with COVID-19 and the social distancing that is happening, people are looking to connect with friends, family and co-workers via Video conferencing more than ever. Recent vulnerabilities in Zoom have made people more cognizant than ever that security needs to be considered when using these platforms no matter what you are using them for.
Jitsi is an open source video conferencing platform that I’ve been hearing about a lot lately, and finally had a chance to look into. In this post I’ll explain how to use Terraform to provision a Jitsi instance when you need a conference and tear it down when you are done. We’ll be using Vultr and their Jitsi “application” and AWS Route 53 for DNS.
As a part of my effort to use Infrastructure as Code to define and automate VMware environments, I’m taking a look at Terraform for VMware provisioning. In this article, I will give a brief intro to Terraform, talk about how it can help in managing your enterprise environments, as well as how it’s different than Ansible. I’ll also provide example code and description for how to provision Windows and Linux VMs.
I recently encountered a situation where I needed to provision hundreds of ESXi hosts. The thing is, there was no vSphere Autodeploy, or HPE Synergy Image Streamer, and no ability to (long story, trust me here) spin them up. No way I’m going to manually provision all of those hosts by hand, so what’s a guy to do?!
This solution will automatically provision ESXi hosts and “get them on the network” so you can add them to vCenter just by using tools that VMware gives us, and a little bit of creativity.
While I designed this solution to work with hundreds of production ESXi hosts, there’s nothing from preventing you from using this method in smaller production environments, or even your own home lab.
VMware Templates: they make life amazing, don’t they? Creating a your first vSphere template is easy, but there are limitations when using them in enterprise environments. In this article, I will talk about the downsides of traditional enterprise template management, how Packer can help, and give examples (and code!) for creating Windows and Linux templates in VMware vCenter using Packer.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how organizations can provide services can operationalize the principles behind Infrastructure as Code in a way that’s accessible. In my experience, if a tool isn’t easy to use, it won’t be used. This is one of the biggest barriers to organizations (and companies that provide services, like mine) benefiting from IaC. It’s my intention that this script will achieve a high level of usability and will also generate and consume reusable code for future use.
Imagine you have an environment that has hundreds of VLANs. When you build a new cluster, there’s a real possibility that one host out of many is mis-configured on just a single port group or VLAN. It’s a pretty simple issue, but it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. Because of that, it’s incredibly difficult to troubleshoot, so I wrote a script to run through every ESXi host, and test connectivity on each port group.
If you haven’t used RVTools before, I’d definitely suggest taking a look. In case you’re one of the few that has not used it, it’s a quick tool to generate a point-in-time report of the inventory/configuration/health of a vSphere environment. While it’s one of the best tools out there for a quick and dirty report of an environment, the challenge I often face is that it outputs too much data. The other challenge I’ve faced is that it’s incredibly difficult to combine and analyze data from multiple outputs.
