Recently I had a customer wanting to identify if a VM of theirs was in Production, Test, or Development based on the VM’s name. Luckily, all of their VMs are named using a naming standard of “{customer}{P|T|D}{application}{server-role}”, giving a generic VM name like “custpdc1” or “cust-t-sql2”. They’re just getting started on their journey with vRealize Orchestrator, and wanted to use it to perform this function. Easy enough, what do we need?

I had a customer upgrade their vCloud Director environment from v8.20 to v9.5. The upgrade itself went fine, however some tenants were now unable to login. Interestingly, the affected tenants were authenticating against their own LDAP server over LDAPS. All other tenants were authenticating against the Service Provider managed LDAP server. For this particular service provider customer and their tenant, the LDAP server was specified using an IP address instead of a FQDN.

Thanks to all 5 of my avid readers, I’ve been awarded vExpert for 2019! What is vExpert? Taken from VMTN The VMware vExpert program is VMware's global evangelist and advocacy program. The program is designed to put VMware's marketing resources towards your advocacy efforts. Promotion of your articles, exposure at our global events, co-op advertising, traffic analysis, and early access to beta programs and VMware's roadmap. The awards are for individuals, not companies, and last for one year.

I’m back from VMware’s internal Worldwide Sales Kickoff in Las Vegas! My first Kickoff and it was everything everyone told me it would be. What is Kickoff? It’s VMware’s internal networking conference for VMware staff that are in some way involved in the sales process. It’s to equip them with the tools and knowledge to deliver real solutions to real world business problems (can you tell it’s working??). The biggest highlight for me was hearing our CEO Pat Gelsinger during his keynote.

After many years of working with VMware products and having been on the receiving side of VMware’s support and business development team, I can now hop the fence and make a difference directly with VMware! I was given the amazing opportunity to join the Brisbane office in Queensland, Australia as a Technical Account Manager and today was my first day! Without a doubt, there is plenty to learn and do over the next few weeks (maybe even months) and I expect this blog will take a temporary back seat until I’ve taken the reigns and settled into my new life.

Introduction We all know the immense pain of managing Windows Server VM templates, regardless of the platform you’re using. Sure, you can build them once then update them manually on a schedule. However, it’s tedious to document and even worse to execute, making sure the template is identical every time (except for your new updates of course). In my experience, you also have to maintain multiple versions and editions of Windows Server.

Just recently a few colleagues of mine were attempting to generate new private keys with a 4096 bit size but they were seeing shocking performance from all of their Linux VMs. They were seeing key generation taking up to 15 minutes while smashing away at the keyboard to generate entropy. It wasn’t a resource issue, the VMs were sized appropriately and showed no signs of stress. They asked me if they could throw a “Chaos Key” USB device into each of the ESXi hosts to generate more entropy to reduce the time it takes, but I knew that wasn’t required (like I was going to let that happen).

If you followed my previous posts on auto deploying a Hugo site from GitHub to S3 (Part 1, Part 2) you may have noticed that GitHub is deprecating the GitHub Services Integration mechanism. This is critical to the auto deployment function so we’ll need an alternative. To add to my woes, I’ve found that the Node deployment package and all of its dependencies involves more maintenance than it deserves. I also noticed that the original Node package was only adding to the target S3 bucket, not performing a sync or equivalent.

With the release of vCloud Director 9.5 I’ve gone ahead and upgraded my test environment from 9.1 (specifically 9.1.0.1) to 9.5. Straight away I notice in the release notes that having a mix of vCloud Director appliances and Linux servers (with vCD installed) is not supported. There is also no supported migration method to move from Linux servers to the appliance. So, in place upgrade it is! I won’t go over the entire experience of using the HTML5 UI, only things I’ve noticed that are new in 9.

VMware has released vCloud Director 9.5! If you go to the My VMware downloads section you won’t find it. You need to change the URL so it has “9_5” on the end: vCloud Director 9.5 Download Assuming you have the right entitlements, you’ll be able to start downloading the upgrade bin’s and the OVA. To find out what’s new, VMware have released a PDF highlighting all the new features: What’s new with vCloud Director 9.