As mentioned in this post I needed to download a private GitHub repo as a ZIP file. The GitHub repo containing this blog is now set to private (mainly to protect my backlog of drafts), which broke my AWS Lambda function (see here and here). Minimal changes were required from the functioning code, but there was a lot of testing. Some key changes were: Setting the GitHub Personal Access Token as a Lambda variable Modify the file download function to use custom headers Consuming the token from within Lambda to access and download the file The new function to download the repo:

As you may know from one of my recent blog posts, the blog you’re reading is a collection of Markdown and Hugo artifacts that, when ‘compiled’ with Hugo, creates a wonderfully lightweight website hosted out of AWS S3. My biggest gripe with my documented deployment from GitHub to S3 was the dependency on the GitHub repo being public. Anyone could see my published and unpublished content. As I’ve been spending quite a bit of time writing new posts, I wanted to protect the repo but still deploy the site automatically as I do now in AWS Lambda.

I don’t like doing things manually. My previous post showing how to replace vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager certificates using the GUI is straight forward, but it’s far too manual. I’m going to show you how to replace the certificate using the vRSLCM 8.1 API(which you can wrap in a script). You can use any tool to interface with the API. I stick to Postman, curl, or if the application provides it, a Swagger UI.

Overview Back in my operational days, my team and I needed ‘pretty’ reports on all VMs in the environment. In almost every case, we needed to include metrics on Guest OS volumes. Back in vRealize Operations 5.x, 6.x and 7.x, I could never find a way report on all instances of a guest volume on many VMs. It always looked like this: Example of a not-so-pretty filesystem report out of vRealize Operations (8.

This post covers the process of replacing a self-signed SSL certificate running on a vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) 8.1 appliance. I’ll be using the UI to show you how to do it. Pre-requisites Make sure you have a defined a certificate template as per https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2112009 Confirm your user account has the correct privileges to request certificates using Microsoft CA Web Server enrollment. At the least, find someone that can submit and approve it for you.

I’ve been spending some time in my vRealize Automation (vRA) 8.1 lab, specifically the Custom Resource capabilities backed by the embedded vRealize Orchestrator instance. I was following the AD User Custom Resource example from the Docs and kept receiving the following error in vRA: Failed to get request status: 500 Internal Server Error from POST http://tango-vro-gateway.prelude.svc.cluster.local:8080/vro/blueprint/blueprint-provider-request?operation=status 500 Internal Server Error when requesting the Custom Resource I was getting this message in vRA whenever I would try to deploy the Blueprint that contained the newly created Custom Resource.

I had a customer recently ask me what vRealize Automation (vRA) 8.1 was able to manage in the public cloud when using blueprints. While I had a very good idea as I’ve got it running in my homelab, I didn’t have any online reference list that I could direct them to. There just isn’t a simple list of it all for a customer to peruse before they have deployed it.

Avid readers, I bring to you a nice little update to one of my more popular posts on how to deploy a Hugo website from GitHub to S3 using GitHub Webhooks, API Gateway and Lambda. Since that post, AWS has stated that they will deprecate support for Python 2.7 starting 31st December 2020. Not only that, the requests module has been removed from the AWS SDK for Python so the file downloads that happen in my Lambda function stopped working.

It’s been a while since my last post! I’ve been spending some time in my homelab with the latest vRealize Suite products. One of those fantastic tools is vRealize Log Insight. I won’t get into the details of the product, but one of the use cases I wanted to tackle for my homelab was ingesting any and all syslog messages I could find. A key piece of my homelab is a PFSense VM that I use for routing and firewall separation between my home network and the components nested snuggly in my HP Z800 Workstation.

Hello again! Today a customer was working with the vRealize Operations 8.0 REST API in Postman and trying to bulk delete “Canceled Alerts”. The documentation in the API states that you need to request a DELETE against the https://{vra-fqdn}/suite-api/api/alerts/bulk API and you should be OK. Well, not exactly. I’ll start this post by assuming that you’ve seen the excellent Postman collection on VMware {code}. This will get you up and running quickly and allow you to login and get an authentication token.