Although there are numerous deployment and config management tools out there, none have had as much traction and continued success as Ansible. Purchased by Red Hat in October 2015, Ansible continues to gain steam in every corner. One of the great things about it and keys to its success is its agentless design. Rather …

Read More

vRealize Automation is useful for deploying a variety of different items as-a-service, from simple IaaS to databases to container hosts and, of course applications. And most of these have been demonstrated to date. One other piece that is often forgotten about is monitoring agents on these systems, or maybe it’s done …

Read More

Although vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) is a great tool for a variety of reasons, one of the more useful abilities it brings to a datacenter is the ability to look inside the guest OS and tell you about its state. Back in 6.2 or maybe 6.3, VMware added the ability to look at guest OS metrics. One of the things …

Read More

Backup servers, I think we can all agree, are of primary importance. We rely upon them for business continuity as much as we rely upon other systems of primary record like Active Directory or DNS. So why is it that we monitor the latter systems with such fervor and the former not at all? Often times, we don’t know that …

Read More

Logging is an extremely important and, in some cases, essential part of a successful data center. That’s why you use a tool like Log Insight to aggregate, query, and alert on them. There are a variety of reasons why having your systems report their logs are crucial. They could be things like compliance: you are bound …

Read More