Docker is a topic that seems all the rage today, and people and organizations are scrambling to understand the technology in order to power their next-generation apps with methodologies such as continuous delivery and micro-services. In order to make standing up Docker easier for those with vRealize Automation, I’ve …

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This article is the first in a series of three which explore the vRealize Automation guest agent in depth. For the others, please see these links. Part 1: Adding machine requestor to local administrators group in vRA 7 Part 2: Running in-guest scripts on Windows VMs in vRA 7 Part 3: Running Bash commands in the Linux …

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With the much-heralded release of Microsoft’s PowerShell, VMware’s PowerCLI Core in fling format was released on October 17th. This allows users of Mac and Linux to run PowerShell just like on Windows. While PowerCLI can be installed with instructions on the fling website, VMware also released a Docker container with …

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Having some sort of log aggregation tool is an extremely important addition to any sort of management or monitoring system, so much so that it can mean the difference between violating SLAs, losing customers, or lengthier outages, and not. Log Insight is a product in the vRealize Suite which is this kind of tool and is …

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I’m inside, at my desk on a Sunday morning having just had some coffee and not in the best of spirits despite looking out the window at a beautifully sunny day on a well-coiffed lawn. I look to my left and patiently wait for a vertical row of four green, blinking lights to calm themselves. It’s definitely a moment of …

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vSphere 6 launched in March of 2015, and since then there have been numerous blogs, presentations, videos, and discussions around the myriad new major features. These are all great improvements to an already solid platform, but there are also lots of un- or minimally-documented features which should be mentioned, …

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Most organizations use vSphere templates for a quick way to roll out VMs manually through vCenter, via a clone workflow in vRealize Automation, or something else. Sometimes they’re just base OS with configuration, and sometimes they have complicated applications installed in the case of VDI. Very often, these would be …

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Most of us have felt the pain in some way of dealing with certificate management in enterprise environments. I suspect for most people, this is one of the least fun tasks in either the virtualization world or IT in general. Let’s face it, it just isn’t something we look forward to doing. Most products out there have a …

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There was recently (12 November 2015) another critical backup-related bug published affecting ESXi 6.x and CBT-based backups. Any backup product that leverages VADP (snapshot-based backup processing) is affected by this issue. For customers using Veeam, here is a workaround if it is not possible to downgrade to ESXi …

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vRealize Orchestrator is VMware’s automation and workflow engine that unlocks the true power of vRealize Automation enabling things like custom machine provisioning/de-provisioning steps and any external systems that may need to be called. For those still using vCenter Orchestrator 5.5, the appliance sees to have one …

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