rudimartinsen.com

Enable Grafana Assistant in a local instance

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:13:40 +0200

One of the announcements of this year's GrafanaCON in Barcelona was the availability of Grafana Assistant also on self-hosted deployments. In this post we'll take a look at how to enable it and test it against a dashboard in my local Grafana instance.

Note that at the time of writing there's still a need for a Grafana Cloud connection since the AI magic is performed in the cloud, with Grafana's LLMs. The local Assistant plugin will forward the LLM requests to Grafana cloud and act on the response in the local instance.

Proxmox Backup Server

Wed, 20 May 2026 14:53:50 +0200

In this post we'll take a look at the Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) which is one of the open-source projects made by Proxmox and it has (obviously) a tight integration with Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) servers.

In my lab environment I have both a PVE cluster as well as a standalone PVE host which we'll connect to the PBS to get some backups started.

First of let's deploy our backup server.

Exam Review - Prometheus Certified Associate

Tue, 12 May 2026 20:17:05 +0200

Last week I sat, and passed, the Prometheus Certified Associate exam. The certification from the Linux Foundation is testing foundational knowledge in observability in general and Prometheus in particular.

"A certified PCA will confirm foundational knowledge for building or scraping observability data in the application stack whether or not it is cloud native" ~ From the Linux Foundation website

Preparations and resources

I've worked with Prometheus for quite some time, although not all the functionality and the most complex queries, but I had a solid base and with this I passed the exam without issues

GrafanaCON 2026

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:53:35 +0200

Last week I attended my first GrafanaCON in Barcelona, a conference I've always wanted to attend.

GrafanaCON is an annual conference dedicated to the Grafana products and open source projects.

The conference is held in North America and Europe in alternating years, and to me a trip to North America for a two day conference is a bit much I've had to wait for the Europe conference to fit my schedule which it did this time.

Migrate Grafana instance to new server

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:31:44 +0100

In my lab I have several Grafana instances. One of which has been with me for quite some time. The server this instance is running on is quite old, and even though it's been updated regularly time has come for it to be decommissioned. While Grafana easily could be redeployed with automation and both dashboard and datasource provisioning I thought I'd document how to migrate my installation from one server to another.

Grafana authentication with Keycloak

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:00:55 +0100

In this post we'll have a quick look at how to integrate Keycloak with Grafana for providing authentication and authorization

Keycloak is an open-source identity provider which is capable of integrating with lots of different applications. It provides support for standard protocols like OpenID Connect, Oauth 2 and SAML. It can federate users from sources like Active Directory, LDAP and databases.

This post will not be a guide on how to install and configure Keycloak, nor is it on installing Grafana, we're focusing on integrating the two.

Lessons learned: Migrating edge sites on VMware vSAN to Proxmox VE

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:49:04 +0100

In this post we'll discuss why, how, and some lessons learned from a project earlier this year migrating a set of edge locations from VMware vSAN to Proxmox VE.

This post is not meant as a comparison between vSAN and Proxmox, neither a recommendation on one or the other. Hopefully it can add some insights into a few things that are important to think about, as well as some of the differences that may (or not) affect operations.

Migrate VMs from VMware ESXi to Proxmox

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 13:41:57 +0100

Today we'll look at one way of migrating VMs from ESXi to Proxmox. There are other ways and other tools as well, but this method utilizes only built in functionality in Proxmox.

Please note that this does not work when the original VM is running on vSAN

The environment we'll use includes an ESXi host that are connected to a vCenter although it could just as well be a standalone host, and a Proxmox VE host

How to Monitor Your Node.js Application Using OpenTelemetry and the Grafana LGTM stack

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 12:31:38 +0200

In this post we'll take a look at how to instrument an application to send signals (metrics, logs, traces) to an OpenTelemetry collector. In our case we use Grafana Alloy as the collector. Alloy will be responsible for processing and exporting these signals to different backends.

The post is quite long and should probably have been broken out in multiple posts, but I wanted to do an all-in-one to show how everything fits together. Feel free to use the TOC above to navigate

Installing Grafana Tempo

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:26:17 +0200

In this post we'll take a quick look at Grafana Tempo and how to install it's OSS version on a virtual machine. Tempo is Grafanaa Labs backend for traces from applications. It is a vital part of the Grafana LGTM stack and together with the other components of the stack it delivers a full observability platform for your apps and infrastructure.

The purpose of this mini-series is to explore and show how things fit together. It's not meant for setting up a production environment.

Installing Grafana Alloy

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 18:27:17 +0200

In this post, which is part of a mini-series on the Grafana LGTM stack, we'll take a look at Grafana Alloy.

Grafana Alloy is an open-source OpenTelemetry collector. It supports both metrics, logs, traces and profiles and can natively ingest those in backends like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Mimir, Loki and Tempo. We'll explore this in this mini-series.

The purpose of this mini-series is to explore and show how things fit together. It's not meant for setting up a production environment.

Installing Grafana Loki

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 08:29:50 +0200

In this post we'll take a quick look at Grafana Loki and how to install it's OSS version on a virtual machine. Loki is Grafana Labs backend for logs from infrastructure components and applications. It is a part of the Grafana LGTM stack and together with the other components of the stack it delivers a full observability platform for your apps and infrastructure.

The purpose of this mini-series is to explore and show how things fit together. It's not meant for setting up a production environment.

Adding shared iSCSI based storage to a Proxmox host and cluster

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0200

In this post we'll see how we can add external storage to a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) host. We'll connect a PVE host to a Storage Array (SAN) through iSCSI and use the external storage as the storage backend for virtual machines.

First of let's take a look at our PVE host

The host is running on a physical server which has a couple of internal disks (this will not be used in this post)

Working with structured metadata in Grafana Loki

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 06:41:59 +0100

This post is a follow up on a previous post where we saw how to utilize Grafana Loki and Promtail to receive and process firewall logs from an OPNsense firewall.

That post discussed log labels in Loki and that the (current) best practice in Loki is to be cautious of adding labels to your logs.

In a discussion with a former colleague we had a look at structured metadata which is a feature added to chunk format v4.

Integrating Proxmox VE with InfluxDB and Grafana for monitoring and visualizing metrics

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 18:26:13 +0100

In this post we'll take a look at how to integrate Proxmox VE's metric server with InfluxDB and visualize metrics from Proxmox in Grafana

Proxmox VE External metrics server

In the environment used for this blog post we have already an InfluxDB server running. The InfluxDB database is running on version 2.7. Proxmox is upgraded to 8.3 which currently is the latest version.

First step is to prepare the InfluxDB for accepting metrics from Proxmox.

Veeam File level restore with Proxmox

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 16:44:31 +0100

In a previous post we saw how to configure Veeam Backup and Replication to perform backup and restore of Proxmox VE virtual machines.

In that post we did some changes to a file in a VM and restored the VM from backup to demonstrate the backup and restore functionality.

An interesting thing with the Proxmox plugin for Veeam is that it actually lets us use the existing File-level Restore (FLR) functionality also for Proxmox VE.

Backing up Proxmox VMs with Veeam

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 16:57:26 +0100

Recently Veeam came with official support for backup and restore of Proxmox Virtual Environment, in this post we'll take a look at how to configure Veeam Backup for a Proxmox VE cluster.

Official documentation for the Proxmox support in Veeam can be found here

The Veeam architecture looks like the following

As we can see the Veeam Backup server connects to a PVE host via the Proxmox plugin. The backup jobs are orchestrated through a Veeam worker installed on the PVE host and it is through this the backups are sent back to the Veeam Backup repository.

Visualizing OPNsense firewall logs with Grafana Loki

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 21:28:47 +0100

This post is a write up of how I've set up forwarding of firewall logs from OPNsense to Grafana Loki. We'll not go through the installation of the components, please refer to the documentation referenced below.

Grafana Loki is a set of open source components that can be composed into a fully featured logging stack

From the Grafana website

So the components in play here are all installed on an Ubuntu server. We have Loki it self which is where the logs ends up and gets indexed. In front of Loki we have Promtail which is the component that receives the logs from OPNsense before they get shipped to Loki.

Deploying a Proxmox Cluster backed by Ceph

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0200

In a few previous posts we've seen how to deploy Proxmox and how to configure a Proxmox Cluster. In the previous cluster post we worked with hosts backed by ZFS storage, i.e. no shared storage. In this post we'll take a look at how to use Ceph as the storage for the cluster.

Whereas the previous cluster posts also supported failover scenarios those all came with a cost of data loss depending on the replication of data between the hosts. With Ceph as the storage backend the workloads will run on shared storage between the hosts and in case of a failure the workload should still be up and running and no data should be lost.

Upgrading a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) Cluster

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:30:00 +0200

This post will take a look at some of the steps needed for upgrading a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE). The environment consists of two PVE hosts running version 8.1.4 and will be upgraded to the, at the time of writing this post, latest version 8.2.7

The upgrade is done in a lab environment running test and development workloads. Please make sure you take appropriate steps before upgrading anything in production

Proxmox Cluster with Witness component to support HA

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 09:30:00 +0200

In this post we will expand on one of my previous posts regarding Proxmox clusters. The cluster post showed how to build a cluster consisting of two nodes with storage replication between them utilizing the built-in ZFS replication feature. However the failover of a workload had to be done manually, as with two nodes there's no quorum.

To mitigate this we will take a look at adding a third component to the cluster which can help us in case of node failures.

Configuring a Proxmox cluster

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0200

In a previous post we saw how to install and configure a (physical) host as a Proxmox Virtual Enironment (PVE) host

In that post we worked with a single physical host with 1 CPU, 64 GB RAM. The host has 4x1GbE ethernet ports and 2x25GbE SFP+ ports. For storage the host has 1x960 GB NVMe disk which will be used as a boot disk, and 2x3.84 TB SSDs we used for ZFS storage.

Installing a Proxmox host

Wed, 29 May 2024 08:37:36 +0200

In this post we'll take a look at Proxmox and more specifically the Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE). We'll install a PVE host, set up storage and networking, and create a virtual machine.

Hardware

The hardware used in this setup is a Supermicro host with 1 physical CPU and 64GB RAM. It has 4x1GbE ethernet ports and 2x25GbE SFP+ ports. The host have 1x960 GB NVMe disk which will be used as a boot disk, and 2x3.84 TB SSDs we'll use for ZFS storage.

Aria Automation Custom Form Changes

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 21:54:45 +0200

In version 8.12 of Aria Automation (aka vRealize Automation) the Custom Form functionality in Service Broker changed. Now the Custom Form is tied to the Cloud Template version as opposed to being decoupled as it previously was.

This introduces some things to be aware of when working with Cloud Templates and Custom Forms. More specifically what happens when we make changes to the Template and release new changes to the Service Broker catalog.

Working with vCenter Storage Policies with Aria Automation Orchestrator

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 22:00:55 +0100

In this post we'll take a quick look at vCenter Storage Policies in Aria Automation Orchestrator (formerly known as vRealize Orchestrator)

Some of this code is fetched from this article by Cody Hosterman

Note! Please make sure to test the code in a Lab environment. Use at your own risk!

The code below will make use of the VcPlugin to fetch Sdkconnections and will use the first vCenter from that list. In my environment Orchestrator is connected to a single vCenter, but if you have multiple vCenters or want to make the code more dynamic you'll need to change that accordingly.

Migrating a vSAN cluster to a new vCenter

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 17:00:00 +0100

This blog post covers a quick write up of how I moved a vSAN cluster to a new vCenter in my homelab

A big warning here before we proceed. This was done in a LAB environment. Please make sure you take appropriate steps to make sure this won't break anything in a Production environment

In the setup used in this blog post we'll have four hosts. The vCenter is running the latest 8.0.2 version, the hosts is running 8.0.1 and the Cluster is running vSAN ESA. We have not enabled things like Encryption, File Services etc.

CKA Exam Review - 2024 edition

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 08:45:31 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I did my recertification for Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

I took the exam originally back in January 2021 and since the exam is valid for three years time so time had come for the recertification.

I did a writeup from back when I sat the exam in 2021, you can find that here

Preparations and resources

My main source of preparations for this exam was my own blogs (shameless plug) and more importantly the blog posts I rewrote for the 2024 attempt. This gave me even more hands-on experience, especially on parts I don't normally touch as much

CKA Notes - Upgrade a Kubernetes Cluster - 2024 edition

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 11:51:32 +0100

Continuing with my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations we're now going to take a look at upgrading a Kubernetes cluster.

This is an updated version of a similar post I created around three years ago.

I'm not taking any precautions on the stuff running in the cluster, and not even backing up the state of the cluster which is something you'd want to do in a "real" environment.

Earlier I've written about how the cluster has been [set up on virtual machines]/2023/12/29/kubernetes-cluster-on-vms-2024) and how it was scaled out with more nodes

CKA Notes - Kubernetes Services - 2024 edition

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 13:48:25 +0100

Continuing with my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations we're now going to take a look at Services in Kubernetes.

This is an updated version of a similar post I created around three years ago.

Networking in Kubernetes is in a way simple, but at the same time complex when we pull in how to communicate in and out of the cluster, so I'll split the posts up in three, covering Cluster & Pod networking, Services(this post), and Ingress. Note that some of these posts have not been updated since 2021.

CKA Study notes - Service Accounts in Kubernetes Pods - 2024 edition

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 14:22:30 +0100

Continuing with my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations I'm now going to take a look at ServiceAccounts.

This is an updated version of a similar post I created around three years ago. Things have changed since then so a new post was called for

Service Accounts provides an distinct identity in a Kubernetes cluster. A Service Account can be used by Pods and other system components to access and communicate through the API scheduler. Service accounts is also a way for external services to authenticate to the cluster.

Installing the NFS CSI Driver on a Kubernetes cluster to allow for dynamic provisioning of Persistent Volumes

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 22:50:43 +0100

In this post we will take a look at connecting a Kubernetes cluster to an existing NFS server. I've previously written a post on this which you can find here. That post also shows how to set up said NFS server for development purposes.

In that previous post we looked at mounting the NFS directly by a Pod, and also through Persistent Volumes (PV) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVC). The provisioning of those (Kubernetes) volumes was static.

CKA Study notes - ConfigMaps and Secrets - 2024 edition

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 18:00:00 +0100

Continuing with my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations I'm now going to take a look at ConfigMaps and Secrets.

This is an updated version of a similar post I created around three years ago.

ConfigMaps are a way to pass configuration to a Pod, or infact other parts of the system. For instance they can be used for configuring parts of a Kubernetes cluster.

1kubectl -n kube-system get configmaps

CKA Study notes - Pod Scheduling - 2024 edition

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 15:00:00 +0100

This post is part of my preparations towards the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam. I have also done a post on Daemon Sets, Replica Sets and Deployments which we normally use for deploying workloads.

This is an updated version of a similar post I created around three years ago.

In this post we'll take a look at Pod scheduling and how we can work with the Kubernetes scheduler and decide how and where Pods are scheduled. This can also be incorporated in Daemon Sets, Replica Sets and Deployments, which is how you normally deploy stuff. I'll keep it easy and just schedule Pods in these examples.

CKA Study Guide - 2024 edition

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0100

Around three years ago I passed the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam. As part of my preparations back then I created blog posts on the content I studied, as well as a summary Study guide post.

This post is an updated version of that study guide. Some of the content is the same, some of it might be updated and some of it is new.

There's lots and lots of study guides out there already, but I find that blogging about something helps me to learn and if that can help others that's a huge bonus. An Overview of the blog posts, both created for my 2024 exam and posts created three years back can be found here

CKA Study notes - Daemon Sets vs Replica Sets vs Deployments - 2024 edition

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 22:00:00 +0100

This will post will be part of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator series and will cover the concepts of Pods, Daemon Sets, Replica sets and Deployments, and the differences between them.

This is an updated version of a similar post I created around three years ago.

Note #1: All documentation references are pointing to version 1.28 as this is the current version of the CKA exam.

Note #2: This is a post covering my study notes preparing for the CKA exam and reflects my understanding of the topic, and what I have focused on during my preparations.

Scaling out a Kubernetes Cluster - 2024 edition

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0100

Intro

This is the follow up from my last post where we saw how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster on virtual machines. It's also an updated version of this post which was written back in 2020. Common for them both is that they're part of my preparation for the CKA exam.

More study notes for that exam can be found here. Note that some of the content was written back in 2020 and might not be 100% accurate for the CKA exam in 2024. I intend to update most of them as I prepare for the exam in early january.

Deploying a Kubernetes Cluster on Virtual Machines - 2024 edition

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 14:56:51 +0100

Intro

For about three years ago I started studying for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam and I decided to do a comprehensive write-up of my study notes.

One of the first things was to bring up my own Kubernetes cluster running in my home lab on virtual machines. That blog post is probably my all-time most visited and I've thought of updating it for a while but never gotten around to it. Now the time has come for renewing my CKA (the CKA and CKAD certifications are valid for three years) so I got another reason for refreshing that blog post.

Monitoring Harbor with Grafana and Prometheus

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 09:23:00 +0100

In this post we'll take a look at how to monitor a self-hosted Harbor instance with Prometheus and Grafana.

Harbor is an open source registry which amongst other things can store your container images. Harbor is an Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduated project.

In my environment Harbor is running on a Ubuntu VM, but it can also run on Kubernetes.

For information on how to install and configure Harbor please refer to the official documentation

vSAN Monitoring with Grafana and InfluxDB

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 09:20:25 +0100

In this post we will take a look at using the Telegraf Agent for pulling vSAN metrics and visualizing them with Grafana.

I've previously written about visualizing vSphere and vSAN metrics with Grafana, you can check out those posts here

This post assumes you already have Telegraf and Grafana running in your environment

For information about how to install Telegraf and Grafana, check the official documentation

Telegraf

Grafana

The Telegraf agent will pull a great deal of metrics, we'll only touch on a few of them in this post. For a full list of metrics check out the Github repo

Mounting a vSAN Remote Datastore (HCI Mesh)

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 08:00:00 +0100

In this post we'll take a look at how to mount a vSAN datastore on another vSAN enabled cluster.

Remote vSAN datastores are also known as vSAN HCI Mesh and was introduced back in September 2020

This feature allows us to use vSAN storage on vSphere clusters where we might not (yet) have vSAN enabled and/or are in need of additional storage. Note that both the clusters involved will be called vSAN clusters even though one of the clusters will have only remote vSAN mounted.

Speaking at VMware Explore 2023 Barcelona

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0200

During both VMworld 2018 and 2019 I was lucky enough to have sessions in the VMTN Tech Talk/vBrownbag track. This was a great experience and something I've wanted to repeat.

Then came the pandemic and both 2020 and 2021 was virtual only. In 2022 I applied for the same track but since the conference was planned for almost half there was a very limited amount of sessions in that track and mine didn't get accepted.

Gitops Your Scheduled Tasks

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 20:00:00 +0200

In this, rather lengthy, post we'll take a stab at using Kubernetes, Git and GitOps to run scripts in our environment. With the help of an existing Developer Infrastructure platform we've moved most of our automation to Kubernetes and a "GitOpsy" mindset.

Why do you wonder? Maybe you're running this as Scheduled tasks on a Windows Server and have done successfully for years?

Well, my take on it is that transitioning a VI Admins ways of running his or hers infrastructure to a more DevOps way has some real advantages. Scheduling in Kubernetes, source control with Git and automated workflows is some of them. Is it a good fit for all? Maybe not. It will take some adjustments, both in the infrastructure, but mostly on the "soft" side, i.e. the organization and the individual admins and operators. But in the long run, I think we all have to go down that route. And as more and more organizations run their workloads in Kubernetes this is a great way of getting hands on as a VI admin.

Aria and Tanzu announcements from VMware Explore US 2023

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:00:00 +0200

VMware Explore US is here and with that there'll be announcements with new features, updates and projects from VMware across their business units (BU).

This post will focus on some of the news from the BU covering the Aria and Tanzu portfolios as announced during the Explore Keynote.

Check out the other posts in the VMware Explore US 2023 series:

VMware Aria and Tanzu announcements

VMware Aria portfolio news

VMware Tanzu portfolio news

VMware Aria News announced during VMware Explore US 2023

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:00:00 +0200

This post is a quick summary of some of the news announced around the VMware Aria (aka vRealize) portfolio during VMware Explore US 2023

My main area of focus over the last few years has been the VMware Aria (or vRealize) portfolio. Hopefully we'll get through the event with no name changes this time, but we'll see..

In general there's a lot of focus on extending the portfolio with (generative) AI capabilities. Some of this has already been discussed and announced during the July Multi-cloud briefing which focused a lot on AI and what it means for multi cloud

VMware Tanzu News announced during VMware Explore US 2023

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:00:00 +0200

This post is a quick summary of some of the news announced around the VMware Tanzu portfolio during VMware Explore US 2023.

Check out the other posts in the VMware Explore US 2023 series:

VMware Aria and Tanzu announcements

VMware Aria portfolio news

VMware Tanzu portfolio news

Tanzu Application Platform

Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) has now reached version 1.6 with a few new features (not all listed):

Tanzu Developer Portal (formerly known as TAP GUI which is based on Backstage from Spotify)
Spring Framework 6 native compilation
Improved Container Image Registry
Bring your own scanner integration
Triaging CVEs
Secure by default workloads (auto HTTPS)
Deployment config per environment for workloads providing great dev and ops flexibility

Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations

A Tech Preview of Tanzu Application Engine is announced which is a new abstraction of the underlying infrastructure which includes workload placement, the kubernetes runtime, infrastructure resources and more, included with predefined policies and guardrails.

Send vCenter Events to Alertmanager With VEBA

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 18:00:00 +0200

In this post we will see how we can integrate Alertmanager with vCenter utilizing the VMware Event Broker Appliance, a.k.a VEBA.

The example used in this blog post is using the event raised when a DRS Fault happens, e.g. when a VM is violating an affinity rule.

First let's get some background about the components used in this post. If you've already familiar with both Alertmanager, vCenter events and VEBA, feel free to skip to this section.

No SSL client purpose on certificate issue on Aria Operations for Logs (aka vRLI)

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 02:00:00 +0200

During an upgrade of my vRealize Log Insight, aka Aria Operations for Logs, I encountered an issue with the custom SSL certificate I had installed on the server.

First I encountered this during the upgrade which had the upgrade to version 8.12 resulting in an error.

Then after resetting the SSL configuration on the server and reverting back to a self-signed cert and successfully upgrading to version 8.12 I encountered the same error when trying to readd both the existing SSL cert and a new one issued from my lab Root CA.

Upgrading Log Insight to 8.12

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 19:06:00 +0200

This post walks through the upgrade process of my vRLI instance running on 8.6 through versions 8.8.2, 8.10.2 and finally to Aria Operations for Logs running version 8.12

Back to the Future

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0200

A short career update:

For the last 3 and a half years I've been working for Proact IT in Norway primarly as a senior consultant working with different customers. I have also been contracted through VMware Professional Services (PSO).

The role as a consultant was totally new for me, and I have had some great experiences with some exciting customer projects, and of course the amazing SDDC team lead by Christian Mohn.

Create vSphere Namespaces in Aria Automation with Permissions

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 19:00:00 +0100

In this previous post we created vSphere Namespaces with ~~vRealize~~ Automation. One thing missing was the ability to set permissions on the namespaces, and that is what we'll take a look at in this post.

We actually saw an example of how to do this in a previous post where with help of the vCenter API created the namespace with ~~vRealize~~ Aria Orchestrator.

The problem with that is that we didn't get a vSphere namespace resource in Automation we could work with, eg for Day 2 operations and lifecycle.

Creating vSphere Namespaces in Aria Automation revisited

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 08:00:00 +0100

In a previous post we took a look at how to create vSphere namespaces with ~~vRealize~~ Aria Automation, and how to utilize the vCenter API to create extensibility around it to get more customization.

Now we'll take a closer look at what we can do in Aria Automation.

We have a Cloud Template that includes a Supervisor Namespace already so we'll see the additional properties we can make use of

Day 2 actions for vSphere with Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters in Aria Automation

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 22:01:56 +0100

This post will take a look at a few of the built-in Day 2 actions we can perform on Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (Workload clusters) in ~~vRealize~~ Aria Automation (vRA).

The post builds on this post where we took a look at how to deploy TKGs clusters with vRA

Let's take a look at the Day 2 actions available to us out-of-the-box

Note that these actions came in vRA 8.8

Deploy vSphere with Tanzu Kubernetes clusters with Aria Automation

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 20:42:36 +0100

In this post we will continue where my last couple of posts left off. They showed how we could create Namespaces through ~~vRealize~~ Aria Automation with a little help from ~~vRealize~~ Aria Orchestrator.

Now we will se how we can create Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters/Guest Clusters/Workload Clusters in vSphere with Tanzu/TKGs with vRA.

Note that this lab environment is running vSphere 7.0.3

Although we in our last post created Namespaces with a vRO workflow to be able to set limits, owner and more, we will revert to the first post and create simple namespaces with the built-in vRA integration in this post.

Create vSphere Namespaces with Aria Automation - part two

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:52:51 +0100

In this previous post we saw how the out-of-the-box functionality for creating Supervisor Namespaces in vSphere with Tanzu (TKGs) worked in ~~vRealize~~ Aria Automation in it's simplest way. In short, we didn't do more than create the namespace with the chosen name. In an upcoming post we will take a look at a few more configuration options for things like limits, VM classes and so forth.

There are however a few things that can't be done through this integration, permissions being one.

Create vSphere namespaces from Aria Automation

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:00:00 +0100

In this post we'll take a look at how to integrate vRealize Automation (Aria Automation) and vSphere with Tanzu (TKGs)

One use-case for this is the ability to allow for self-service of Supervisor namespaces. A developer could request a namespace in a designated vRA Project and from that start to deploy their Kubernetes workloads without the need for contacting the vSphere Administrator. And since vRA both offers a UI and an extensive API the developers can request the resources the way that suits them best.

Introducing the Tanzu Tech Zone

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 09:16:38 +0100

Recently VMware launced a new "techzone", namely the Tanzu Tech Zone. Tanzu Tech Zone is a part of the Apps & Cloud Management Tech Zone covering both the Tanzu and Aria suite of products

Other Tech Zones include Carbon Black, Cloud Platform, Digital Workspace, Networking and Security, VMware Cloud

VMware's Tech Zones are a great starting point when searching for learning resources and technical content in the different areas. Blog posts, webinars, demos, whitepapers and documentation all accessed from the same place

VMware Identity Manager instance IP address change

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0100

This post will go through the steps taken for changing IP address on a VMware Identity Manager (vIDM)/Workspace ONE Access instance in my lab environment. Note that this does only cover a single instance installation and not a Identity Manager cluster

Environment setup

The vIDM instance is running version 3.3.6. and is in use by both a vRealize Automation (vRA) cluster and a single vRealize Automation instance deployed through vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM).

vRealize Automation Cluster IP Change

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0100

This post will go through the steps taken for changing IP addresses on a vRealize Automation (or Aria Automation which will, eventually, be the new name) cluster in my lab environment.

Environment setup

The vRA cluster is running version 8.10.0 and has been deployed through vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM). The cluster consists of three nodes, and a Virtual IP (VIP) is set for the Load Balancer in front. The Load Balancer in use is the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Networks).

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager IP address change

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0100

This post will go through the steps taken for changing IP address on a vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) instance in my lab environment

Change IP addresses on a vRealize Log Insight cluster

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 11:51:24 +0100

This post will go through the steps taken for changing IP addresses on a vRealize Log Insight cluster.

Environment setup

The vRLI cluster is running version 8.8.2 and has been deployed through vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. The cluster consists of three nodes, and a VIP is set for the Integrated Load Balancer

A couple of screenshots from vRSLCM

The network the nodes are connected to is a NSX Overlay network connected to a Tier-1 Gateway which is connected to a Tier-0 Gateway with an Edge Cluster configured.

VMware Aria and December Multi-Cloud briefing

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 18:00:00 +0100

During VMware Explore VMware announced the rebranding of the vRealize portfolio (and a few other solutions) to VMware Aria.

I'll not discuss the name change in detail in this post and what I think of some of the more lengthy and intricate names, I will however take a quick look at a couple of the new(er) products in the portfolio which was a focus both during VMwware Explore and also in today's Multi-cloud Briefing.

Exam Review - VCAP DCV Deploy 2022 (3V0-22.21N)

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 17:00:00 +0100

It's been a few years since I sat my Data Center Virtualization deploy exam, after which I wrote my first Exam Review. Initially I'd decided to wait until next year with renewing my VCAP Deploy, but after some discussions during VMware Explore I decided to have a go earlier this week.

This post will be a write-up of my Exam experience experience that lead to achieving the VMware Certified Advanced Professional Data Center Virtualization Deploy 2022 certification. The specific exam I took was 3V0-22.21N

VMware Retires Tanzu Community Edition

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 10:00:00 +0200

Last year in October, VMware released VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). Aimed to be a "freely available, community-supported, open source distribution of VMware Tanzu".

Today they've announced that they've killed it.

Over the past year I've played around with TCE and been happy with the ability to spin up a Tanzu cluster on my laptop to test out both Kubernetes features and Tanzu specific stuff which later could be applied to the full-fledged Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.

vSphere with Tanzu - Namespaces and Guest Clusters

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 20:00:00 +0200

This is the third in a mini-series of posts around vSphere with Tanzu in a vSphere 7 Update 3 environment. In the first post we deployed and configured the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (formerly Avi Vantage) for providing Load Balancing services, in the second post we enabled Workload Management in vSphere and with that we got a Supervisor Cluster which we will use to create Namespaces and Tanzu Kubernetes (Guest) Clusters.

This post is quite long with a lot of screenshots, please bear with me...

vSphere With Tanzu - Enable Workload Management in vSphere 7 update 3

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 10:43:07 +0200

This post will take a look at the configuration steps needed in vCenter for deploying vSphere with Tanzu (TKGs) using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Vantage) as the load balancer.

The configuration of the Load Balancer can be found here

I will use the latest version available of Avi (22.1.1) in this post, please make sure you verify the compatibility between the Load balancer and the solution you'll use it for.

vSphere with Tanzu - NSX Advanced Load Balancer 22.1

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 20:00:00 +0200

I have previously written about how to deploy the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (aka Avi Vantage) and configured it for use with vSphere with Tanzu.

As things move quickly in tech I wanted to do a refresh of this, as there has been a change in the Avi UI and in the vSphere workload management setup.

This post will focus on the deployment and initial configuration of the Avi load balancer, in an upcoming post we will take a look at the vSphere with Tanzu setup.

Exam Review NSX Advanced Load Balancer for Operators skills exam

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 23:03:34 +0200

Recently I've been looking closer into the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, formerly known as Avi Vantage (and to be fair still called by many). For me doing certifications are a good way to learn and get some kind of validation of what I've learnt so I decided to have a go at the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer(Avi) for Operators Skills exam (5V0-43.21). As I normally do I thought I'd do a short write up of the exam and the resources I've used as preparations.

Exam Review VCP-CMA 2022

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 09:30:00 +0200

After a very busy spring and start of the summer I finally got to sit the Professional VMware vRealize Automation 8.3 (2V0-31.21) to update my VCP (VMware Certified Professional) in Cloud Management and Automation (CMA)

It's been almost two years since I did the vRA VCP exam and that was based on vRA 7.6 whereas the 2022 edition is based on vRA 8.3

I sat the exam at home with Pearson Vue's remote proctoring which I did a review of back in 2020 when it was launched as an option. The experience this time was pretty much the same, but as more people are doing remote proctoring be prepared for waiting for a proctor and the release of your exam.

Delete Failed vRO Workflow Runs

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 20:41:26 +0100

If you have worked with vRealize Orchestrator 7 you'll probably have a love/hate relationship to the long-lived Java client.

vRO 8 deprecated the Java client and we're left with the HTML5 interface (yes, I know that you might be able to use the old client for some operations still..). The switch has been a bit of the struggle for some of us, but now I've gotten used to the HTML client now and started to enjoy it.

Running Plex on a Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes Cluster

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 09:00:00 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Kubernetes distributions

As part of the VMware vExpert Applicaton Modernization group I was invited to be a part of a Tanzu Challenge this month. The task was to get a Plex solution up and running on Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) cluster. The solution should be "production grade", including both management and protection of the data and configuration, monitoring, logging and recovery/high availability.

Deploy Velero for backup and restore in a Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) cluster

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 09:00:00 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Kubernetes distributions

I've previously written about how to set up Velero for Backup/Restore functionality in a Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster.

Deploy ExternalDNS on TCE and integrate with a Microsoft DNS server

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 16:00:00 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Kubernetes distributions

Following up on my multiple blog posts on installing packages through the Tanzu Package repository on Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) Kubernetes clusters we'll now take a look at external-dns.

Building a vRealize Log Insight dashboard

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0100

In a previous post I covered how I've configured my Mikrotik router to send firewall logs to vRealize Log Insight through it's remote syslog capabilities.

We looked at how we could extract fields to get some value from these logs and one of the best parts of having those fields is that we can make use of them to build widgets and put those into nice Dashboards!

This post is just as much a primer on how to build dashboards in vRLI as it is discussing the Mikrotik data so even if you don't have a Mikrotik firewall log to digest you might get some value out of it.

Shipping Mikrotik firewall logs to vRealize Log Insight

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 09:00:00 +0100

Recently I installed a Mikrotik router at home and since I'm in my lab environment are running vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) and I'm using this as my Syslog server I wanted to push logs from the firewall to vRLI.

Since I couldn't find any content packs for Mikrotik I thought I'd take the opportunity to do a walkthrough of how to extract fields from syslog messages to get some value from them.

Deploying Harbor registry with Tanzu Packages

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 20:15:00 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Kubernetes distributions

Continuing with Tanzu Packages and Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) clusters we'll now take a look at deploying a Harbor Image registry.

Configuring Fluent Bit to push logs from Tanzu Community Edition clusters to vRealize Log Insight

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Kubernetes distributions

Logging is an important part of any infrastructure service and a Kubernetes cluster is no different. In this post we'll see how we can use Fluent Bit to work with logs from containers running in a Kubernetes cluster.

Mounting NFS to a container running on Kubernetes

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 15:00:00 +0100

In this post I'll take a look at how to set up a simple NFS server on Ubuntu and make use of it in a nginx container running on a Kubernetes cluster

NFS is a file system protocol that allows for sharing files and directories over a network. It has been around for a long time and for many purposes it has been replaced by other more modern storage solutions, but still there are use-cases for it and organizations using it.

Integrate NSX Advanced Load Balancer with Kubernetes

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 09:00:00 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Kubernetes distributions

A Load Balancer is an essential part of a Kubernetes cluster and something that we need to provide ourselves, it is not a built-in feature.

Deploy Prometheus and Grafana on a Tanzu Community Edition cluster

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 11:00:00 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Kubernetes distributions

Over a few posts lately I've worked with Tanzu Community Edition

Installing Contour on a Tanzu Community Edition cluster

Sun, 02 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Kubernetes distributions

In an earlier post I installed MetalLB as a LoadBalancer service provider on a Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) cluster. A LoadBalancer is essential, but to be able to work with L7 and http we need to make use of the Ingress resource in Kubernetes. Ingress objects requires an Ingress Controller to work, and one of the most popular ones are Contour

Using MetalLB as a load balancer in a Kubernetes cluster

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 14:00:00 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Kubernetes distributions

This will be a short write up on how to deploy MetalLB as a load balancer for Kubernetes.

TCE Cluster on vSphere

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 11:15:54 +0100

Update 2022-10-21: After just one year in the wild VMware announced on Oct 21 2022 that they would no longer update or maintain the TCE project and that by end of 2022 the Github project will be removed. For more information check out my blog post here

Most of the things mentioned in this post (outside of installing TCE) should still be valid for other Tanzu Kubernetes distributions

Earlier this year VMware announced it's open-source Kubernetes offering Tanzu Community Edition, which is a full-featured Kubernetes platform. It's aimed for anyone that wants to get their hands dirty with an enterprise grade Kubernetes platform, but as it's fully featured with the commercial VMware Tanzu offering it can be used for much more than "just learning". Bear in mind though that it does not come with any official support and that there's (currently) no way to easily shift from TCE to the commercial offerings.

Detecting and Preventing Log4j attacks with NSX Advanced Load Balancer

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:16:32 +0100

In my homelab I'm running a few services behind the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Vantage) and I wanted to check if Avi could detect, and hopefully stop, attempts to exploit the new Apache Log4j vulnerability.

Note that the functionality used in this blog post requires the Enterprise Edition of the NSX Advanced Load Balancer

The setup

First let's take a quick look at the setup and what I'll use to test this.

Tanzu Vanguard Community

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 19:26:53 +0100

This week I got accepted in to the Tanzu Vanguard community! I'm very excited by this and can't wait to get to know the community even better

Create Avi Virtual Service from vRealize Automation

Sun, 14 Nov 2021 09:00:00 +0100

In my lab environment I have an NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) running and providing load balancing capabilities for a couple of services. Using the Avi UI isn't very complicated even though there are a lot of options that can be configured, but I wanted to have the ability to configure it through a catalog item in the vRealize Automation Service Broker so I wanted to see how I could accomplish just that.

Tanzu Backup and Restore with Standalone Velero

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 12:47:25 +0200

In this post we will take a look at backup and restore of workloads inside of vSphere with Tanzu. In this setup where we have vSphere with Tanzu setup with vSphere networking, we will use the Standalone Velero and Restic solution as opposed to the more integrated Velero operator that can be utilized when using NSX-T as the networking stack.

Backing up and restoring vSphere with Tanzu

First a note on backups of a vSphere with Tanzu environment..

vRealize - Whats New October 2021

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 14:00:00 +0200

This week VMware are announcing new features in the vRealize suite products. Most of the vRealize Suite products went GA with their 8.5 version in August, but since many of the vRealize products release cycle is now at monthly releases, both for the SaaS and the On-prem version we'll be getting an 8.6 version pretty soon.

During VMworld week the following updates are announced, some are visions and strategies others are actual new features:

Avi LB - Remove Orphaned Pools and Policysets

Sat, 18 Sep 2021 09:11:27 +0200

In my home lab I am continuosly tearing stuff up and down which might leave resources in an orphaned state. The other day after removing Workload Management in vSphere which I had enabled with the NSX Advanced Loadbalancer (a.k.a Avi) I noticed that the Virtual Services was left in the Load Balancer.

Previously these have been removed as well when disabling Workload Management, but this time my Supervisor Cluster was in an unhealty state before disabling so I suspect this messed up the removal of the Avi services.

Changing the Avi Load Balancer license tier and how to fix the validation errors

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 15:00:00 +0200

I've been playing around with vSphere with Tanzu for a while, both with and without NSX-T. Initially the no-NSX-T load balancer option was to use a pre-built HAProxy appliance provided by VMware. That worked, and still does, but when vSphere 7.0 U2 released we got the option to use the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB), formerly known as Avi Vantage which in many ways are more powerful, and it also comes with an UI that HAProxy doesn't have.

NSX-T 3.1 Home lab - Testing Setup

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0200

In the previous post in this mini-series I walked through how I've set up and configured NSX-T 3.1.1 in my home lab. This post will test the configuration to (hopefully) verify my work.

We'll also create a Tier-0 Gateway to get some external connectivity in and out of our NSX environment.

Test setup

With all the Fabric configuration done we can test our setup.

I'm creating two overlay segments in NSX connected to a Tier-1 gateway, and after that we'll create a Tier-0 gateway and connect the T1 gateway to it to get North/South connectivity to the overlay resources

NSX-T 3.1 Home lab - Setup and Fabric configuration

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 16:00:00 +0200

I'm doing a mini-series on my NSX-T home lab setup. It's not meant for anything production, and there is other resources out there that explain NSX in more detail than I'll be doing here.

This post will be a write-up of the NSX-T Fabric configuration in my home lab. The next post will test the configuration, and the third post will be a test of some of the services available (e.g. DHCP, Load Balancer etc).

Basic Load Balancing With the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB)

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 07:35:24 +0200

With vSphere with Tanzu in vSphere 7.0 Update 2 we got the ability to use the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB), formerly known as AVI networks, as the load balancer in the Supervisor cluster. This opened up a bit of a new world for me as I had little to no experience with the product.

Although I think I'll mostly be dealing with the ALB through Tanzu I thought I'd test it as a regular Load Balancer as well to test, and understand how the stuff really works.

Exam Review - VCP Application Modernization 2021 (2V0-71.21)

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 15:55:00 +0200

Recently I passed the Professional VMware Application Modernization exam (2V0-71.21). This is a short write-up of my experience with this exam.

The VMware Certified Professional Application Modernization certification is brand new and is testing skills in the Cloud Native and Application Modernization areas.

From the VMware certification page:

This exam tests a candidate’s expertise with VMware Tanzu Standard Edition including vSphere with Tanzu, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Tanzu Mission Control. The exam also tests fundamental cloud native skills including containerization, Kubernetes, and application modernization.

VMware Tanzu - Deploying the Advanced Load Balancer

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 13:03:23 +0200

In this post we'll step through the deployment and configuration of a NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Networks LB) for use with vSphere with Tanzu

Exam Review - Master Specialist HCI

Fri, 14 May 2021 12:26:02 +0200

Recently I passed the VMware Certified Master Specialist - HCI exam (5V0-21.21). This is a short write-up of my experience with this exam.

When I passed the vSAN Specialist exam last year I wanted to go for the Master Specialist exam as well since I'd heard that there was some similarities, and that the HCI exam was largely based on vSAN.

At that time however I hadn't updated my VCP-DCV to a required one for the HCI Master so I decided to wait until I'd got myself a new VCP-DCV.

Tanzu Mission Control - Policies

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 13:25:52 +0200

In a few posts I've been playing around in Tanzu Mission Control, TMC for short. TMC is VMware's SaaS offering for managing Kubernetes clusters cross different clouds and providers.

In this post we'll take a look at Policies in Tanzu Mission Control and how we can use them with our Kubernetes clusters.

What are Tanzu Mission Control Policies?

TMC lets you create various policies for controlling different concepts in your clusters. These policies helps us to manage the operations and the security of our resources. The (current) types of policies available are:

Runecast for Azure

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 15:00:00 +0100

In my last post I took a look at Runecast Analyzer and what it can help us with when it comes to AWS as well as Kubernetes environments. Today Runecast announced that in their new version 5.0 of Runecast Analyzer we can also connect to, and analyze, Azure environments!

Before we check out the Azure integration let's have a quick look at some of the improvements added to Runecast Analyzer since the last major release in December 2019. With version 4.0 the AWS integration came, before that Runecast analyzed vSphere and vSAN (added in 3.0) only.

Runecast Analyzer for AWS and Kubernetes

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 20:00:00 +0100

Since I decided to test Runecast in my lab recently I've mainly been looking at the vSphere capabilities.

Now I've also connected Runecast to a Kubernetes cluster and to an AWS account to see what we can get from that. The ability to get informed about security issues and best practices in the context of my environment is great. This saves me lot's of time digging in to AWS documentation as I get the information already digested and presented to me.

A Second Look at Runecast

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 20:00:00 +0100

A couple of years back I took a look at Runecast and even though I liked what I saw I got tied up with other projects and engagements. Taking a new look at this product has been on my list for quite some time, and since a couple of weeks I've had it running in my lab

So far I'm quite happy with the product. I really like that it does what it claims to do and that it doesn't try to solve "everything". In a few areas it's stepping into vRealize Operations territory by looking for things like config issues and best practices, but it does not monitor performance. This makes the product lighter, more performant, and easier to manage.

vROps Management Pack for Kubernetes

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 10:00:00 +0100

In this post we'll take a look at the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Kubernetes

Currently it ships in version 1.5.1, and our vRealize Operations Manager is running 8.2. Note that I'm referring to the on-premises version of vROps in this post.

The management pack supports monitoring, troubleshooting and optimizing capacity management for Kubernetes clusters. In addition it has a few other promising capabilities

Auto-discover Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated (TKGI, formerly PKS) and Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) Kubernetes clusters (Note! Currently only AWS clusterss are supported through the TMC integration)
Visualization of Kubernetes cluster topologies, including Namespaces, Replica sets, Nodes, Pods and Containers
Performance Monitoring
Inventory dashboards for Kubernetes clusters
Alerts for Kubernetes clusters
Mapping Kubernetes nodes to virtual machines
Reporting on capacity, configuration and inventory of clusters or pods

Sounds interesting, let's take a closer look!

Tanzu Mission Control - Data Protection

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 17:00:00 +0100

Lately I've been playing around in Tanzu Mission Control, TMC for short. TMC is VMware's SaaS offering for managing Kubernetes clusters cross different clouds and providers.

So far we've seen how to attach existing clusters and how to create new clusters.

In this post we'll take a look at how to enable and use the Data Protection capabilities in TMC.

Note that when preparing for this post I came across this post from fellow vExpert Dean Lewis. He has also done a series of blog posts around TMC which is worth checking out

Another year as VMware vExpert

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 10:25:24 +0100

The list of VMware vExperts for 2021 was announced last week, and I'm proud to say that I'm still a part of this great community.

This is my fourth consecutive year and I'm happy that the community is strong, and increasing year by year. 2021 includes 2100+ vExperts from over 40 different countries!

The vExpert program is VMware's global evangelism and advocacy program. Hence it is not a technical certification, but rather an award for those that engages with their community to share their knowledge. "Giving back" is a key in this program. Activities that are looked at are blogging, event speaking, VMUG leadership and so on.

Exam Review - VMware vSphere with Tanzu Specialist 2021

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 19:09:21 +0100

A few weeks ago I sat the VMware vSphere with Tanzu Specialist (5V0-23.20) exam and I'm happy to say I passed it with a score of 370.

This will be a short post on the exam and the preparations I did before taking it

Update 2021-06: VMware has now released a VMware Certified Professional Application Modernization certification. Check this blog post for more information about that

Exam guide and requirements

The VMware Exam guide lists the objectives tested in this exam.

Tanzu Mission Control - Creating Clusters

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 19:00:00 +0100

In a few previous blog posts I've covered how to add existing clusters to Tanzu Mission Control, VMware's cloud service for managing Kubernetes clusters across clouds and providers. Check out the intro post here and the post covering adding clusters from multiple clouds here.

In this post we'll take a look at creating new clusters, right from the TMC console. It'll be a long blog post, but there's lots of screen shots so bear with me.

Tanzu Mission Control - Attaching Clusters

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 10:50:22 +0100

I've already written a short intro post to Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) here, where we attached an existing cluster.

In this post we'll take a look at attaching clusters, both existing clusters from different clouds and providers. With the interest of not writing a too long blog post I've left the creation of new clusters out, you can read my blog post on that here.

Cluster groups

Before adding anything else to our TMC instance we'll create a couple of Cluster groups just to keep things a bit tidy. How you structure this is obviously up to you, I'll add groups for my different environments

Tanzu Mission Control - Intro

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 17:23:04 +0100

Recently I've been playing around with VMware Tanzu and specifically vSphere with Tanzu. VMware Tanzu is a whole suite of different products and services, and to be honest it's not always easy to keep track of what's what and how things relates to eachother.

This post will be taking a closer look at a service VMware provides for managing Kubernetes across multiple clouds and cloud providers. To me this is a very promising offering and one of those things that can make a difference in a VI admins struggle to keep up with Dev's everlasting push for infra.

CKAD Exam Review

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 08:09:02 +0100

After taking and passing the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam a couple of weeks ago I decided to go for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD exam. Last week I sat that exam and (to my surprise) I passed with a perfect score of 100%.

Preparations and Resources

I have already done quite a few blog posts with study material in my preparations for this exam so this post won't cover any specifics on the Objectives themselves. A lot of the study material is the same for preparations against the CKA exam.

CKA Study notes - Resource Requirements and limits

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 13:00:00 +0100

This post is part of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations. Now we'll take a look at how to specify the resource requirements and limits we can set on a container in a Pod

With requirements we can specify how much resources a container needs, and with limits we can specify the maximum of resources a Pod can use

Note #1: I'm using documentation for version 1.19 in my references below as this is the version used in the current (jan 2021) CKA exam. Please check the version applicable to your usecase and/or environment

CKAD Study Guide

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 13:30:00 +0100

After preparing for, and passing, the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam I decided to continue my studies and go for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam.

There's some overlap between the two exams so a lot of the preparations done for one of them can help preparing for the other as well.

With that said there are obviously differences in objectives, and the level of understanding, tested. The CKA exam is, as the certification name implies, most focused on the administrative side of Kubernetes, whereas the CKAD exam is more focused on running applications inside a cluster. The CKA exam does test your understanding on how to run and manage applications on a cluster, but the CKAD goes to a bit more depth.

CKA Study notes - Pod Service Account

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 13:00:00 +0100

This post is part of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations. In this post we'll take a quick look at how to specify which service account a Pod should use when communicating with the API server. I think for the CKA (and CKAD) exam the most important thing to know is how to specify a service account, but I'm covering a bit more.

Update January 2024: This post was written in 2021 preparing for the CKA on version 1.19. An updated post for version 1.28 can be found here

CKA Exam Review

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 09:29:24 +0100

Last week I sat the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam and I'm very excited that I passed the exam. This post will be a write-up of how I found the exam and a few things to prepare for.

Preparations and resources

I have already done quite a few blog posts with study material in my preparations for this exam so this post won't cover any specifics on the Objectives themselves.

The information given by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Linux Foundation (LF) is very good and is something that you should familiarise yourself with.

CKA Study notes - Troubleshooting

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 11:30:27 +0100

Continuing with my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations I'm now going to take a look at the Troubleshooting objective. I've split this into three posts, Application Monitoring, Logging and Troubleshooting (this post)

The troubleshooting objective counts for 30% so based on weight it's the most important objective in the exam so be sure to spend some time studying it. The Kubernetes Documentation is as always the place to go, as this is available during the exam. Troubleshooting is often very situation specific, and oftentimes we need to combine multiple troubleshooting techniques. These posts will be fairly generic and again based on studying for the CKA exam

CKA Study notes - Logging

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 11:30:21 +0100

CKA Study notes - Monitoring applications

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 09:50:03 +0100

CKA Study notes - Ingress

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0100

This post is part of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations. Time has come for the Networking concepts in Kubernetes.

As for the CKA exam the Services & Networking objective weighs 20% of the exam so it is an important section.

CKA Study notes - Services

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0100

This post is part of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations. Time has come for the Networking concepts in Kubernetes.

As for the CKA exam the Services & Networking objective weighs 20% of the exam so it is an important section.

CKA Study notes - Kubernetes Networking

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 09:14:10 +0100

This post is part of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations. Time has come for the Networking concepts in Kubernetes.

As for the CKA exam the Services & Networking objective weighs 20% of the exam so it is an important section.

CKA Study notes - Persistent Volumes and Claims

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 18:04:02 +0100

Continuing with my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations I'm now going to take a look at how to work with storage in Kubernetes.

Implementing storage in a Kubernetes cluster is a big topic, and my posts will touch on only a few parts of it. Remember that Storage has a weight of 10% in the CKA exam curriculum so I'm guessing it's more of an understanding of concepts that are tested, than specific knowledge.

CKA Study notes - Storage volumes

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 13:42:03 +0100

Continuing with my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations I'm now going to take a look at how to work with storage in Kubernetes.

Note that this post was created in 2021 and things might have changed since then. I have a newer post covering some of the same content which is also using a separate NFS server running on an Ubuntu Linux server. You can find that post here

CKA Study notes - ConfigMaps and Secrets

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 15:00:00 +0100

Continuing with my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam preparations I'm now going to take a look at ConfigMaps and Secrets.

ConfigMaps are a way to pass configuration to a Pod, or infact other parts of the system. For instance they can be used for configuring parts of a Kubernetes cluster.

The above lists the kube-system configmaps in my Kubernetes cluster.

Secrets are similar to ConfigMaps, but they are designed to hold smaller objects and meant to be used for sensitive data like passwords, tokens etc.

So Long GlobalDashboardPS - You're finally home

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 17:00:00 +0100

Almost 2 years ago, in March 2019, I pushed the first commit to the HPE GlobaldashboardPS Powershell module. Now, the module will get some needed TLC from the people that should own it, HPE

New Year New Look

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 22:48:10 +0100

A new year calls for a new look don't you think? I've switched the theme on my blog to the Hugo Clarity theme!

CKA Study notes - Pod Scheduling

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 14:03:23 +0100

CKA Study notes - Daemon Sets vs Replica Sets vs Deployments

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 08:42:07 +0100

This will post will be part of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator series and will cover the concepts of Daemon Sets, Replica sets and Deployments, and the differences between them.

Update january 2024: This post is over three years old and some things might have changed. An updated version of the post can be found here

Note #1: I'm using documentation for version 1.19 in my references below as this is the version used in the current (dec 2021) CKA exam. Please check the version applicable to your usecase and/or environment

CKA Study notes - Backup & Restore etcd

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 13:33:16 +0100

In my preparation for the CKA exam I've now come to the "Implement etcd backup and restore" objective. I'm not entirely sure what to expect in the exam around that as I suspect the etcd to be running in "stacked" mode in the provided clusters.

However, as I've mentioned in my study guide, this is just as much of a Kubernetes learning process as a exam prep for me so I thought I'd take a closer look at etcd and how to operate it.

Upgrading a Kubernetes Cluster

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 09:35:37 +0100

In this post I'll cover the basic steps of upgrading a Kubernetes cluster.

This post is part of my preparations for the CKA exam and the cluster upgraded is not running any production loads so please take that into account when reading this post.

This post was written back in 2020, things have changed since then. A new version of this post can be found here

I'm not taking any precautions on the stuff running in the cluster, and not even backing up the state of the cluster which is something you'd want to do in a "real" environment.

CKA Study Guide

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 08:55:23 +0100

I started studying for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam a few months ago and wrote a few posts on getting started with a Kubernetes cluster on vSphere.

My plan was to sit the exam by September, but I got held up in some projects at work and privately so I had to postpone it. Now I'm back in the race, and plan to do the exam early 2021.

This post will include the study resources I'm using and/or planning to use. I'll update it as I go along, and I plan to create some blog posts on specific topics as I did with the post mentioned before. There's lots and lots of study guides out there already, but I find that blogging about something helps me to learn and if that can help others that's a huge bonus.

Dumping an IPAM solution to Github with vRealize Orchestrator

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 09:40:39 +0100

In this post we'll take a look at the phpipam API, the GitHub API and using vRealize Orchestrator to connect the two.

We'll see how we can extract IP address assignments from an IPAM solution with vRealize Orhcestrator and then push that data to a (private) GitHub repository.

The challenge

In my employer's lab environment we have an IPAM solution handling a small number of subnets. The IPAM solution we use is the open-source phpipam.net

vRO 8.1 - Assigning values to Variables with Powershell and Scriptable tasks

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 13:41:16 +0100

One of the exiting new features in the vRA/vRO 8.1 platform is the ability to use Powershell as a native language in vRO. You can also use Python and node.js as well, in addition to the tradional Javascript.

One catch is that you need to have a vRA license to be able to use the new languages natively, meaning it doesn't work in a standalone vRO installation.

I haven't had as much time as I wanted to play around with vRO 8.x yet, but a recent task had me set out to explore it a bit further.

vRealize Automation 8 - Grow Cluster

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 13:43:41 +0100

In this blog post we'll take a look at how to extend a single node vRealize Automation 8.1 installation to a cluster of three nodes.

The current vRA 8.1 installation is working and has a few blueprints created for deployment of VMs and a couple of deployments running. vRA was installed with the vRealize Easy Installer which deploys vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager as well as VMware Identity Manager.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager is what we'll use for growing the existing vRA installation. Lifecycle Manager makes the deployment and lifecycle of the vRealize products easier, but it is essential that you cover the prerequisites and read the Release notes first. If not you might face some issues that Lifecycle Manager can't help you with.

ESXi on ARM - Running Alpine Linux

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 19:44:30 +0200

Recently the VMware fling ESXiOnARM was released. The first few days people was doing all sorts of cool things with it.

On the night of the release I had my first RPi up and running, and after getting it in to vCenter I wanted to run a VM on it.

I chose PhotonOS as my first operating system to take for a spin as it was on the list of supported OSes. After getting PhotonOS up and running I turned to Twitter to join the flow of updates from people playing around with the new Fling.

ESXi on ARM - Installing ESXi on a Raspberry Pi

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 10:11:26 +0200

Ever since the keynote on VMworld 2019 when Pat Gelsinger and Ray O'Farrel showed off ESXi running on a Raspberry Pi the hype around it has been huge

Together with the release of vSphere 7.0 U1 on October 6th VMware released it's newest fling which finally gave us the ability to run ESXi on ARM!

In this post I'll run through the steps it took me to get ESXi up and running on a Raspberry PI 4 8GB and added to vCenter.

vRealize Cloud Management News and Announcements

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 14:00:00 +0200

Over the last few weeks the task of staying on top of all VMware news has become nearly impossible to master. The new stuff around all things Tanzu and Kubernetes is especially interesting, but there's also lots of news coming in vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T as well.

Please check out this post by my colleague Christian Mohn for an overview of the vSphere 7.1 news

In this post I'll take a stab at looking into a few of the news coming to the vRealize universe

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana 7 - Configure InfluxDB Authentication and https

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 20:00:00 +0200

Intro

This is the eleventh part of a blog series about Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana where we use vSphere performance data as our metric data.

In the last post we discussed a few dashboards I've created that makes use of the features we've discussed so far in this series.

In this post we'll focus more on InfluxDB it self, and how to set up some authentication.

The posts in this series build on each other, but you should hopefully be able to use them as reference if you're just jumping in to a specific post. I am using vSphere performance data from an InfluxDB database pulled by Telegraf for my examples.

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, Influxdb and Grafana 7 - Finished Dashboards for Importing

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0200

Intro

This is the tenth part of a blog series about Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana where we use vSphere performance data as our metric data.

In the last posts we've seen how to build out dashboards in Grafana by using different visualization panels and by using features like variables, rows and repeating to make our dashboards more dynamic and allow for user interaction.

In this post I'll present a few dashboards I've created that makes use of these features.

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, Influxdb and Grafana 7 - Rows and Repeating

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 11:10:57 +0200

Intro

This is the ninth part of a blog series about Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana where we use vSphere performance data as our metric data.

We have seen how we can use different types of panels and how we can use variables to create dynamic and reusable dashboards. In this post we will take a look at a couple of features in Grafana that can help when you build out dynamic dashboards: rows and repeating.

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, Influxdb and Grafana 7 - Manual queries

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0200

Intro

This is the eight part of a blog series about Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana where we use vSphere performance data as our metric data.

Over the last posts we have seen a few of the built-in panels in Grafana as well as how to add community plugins which can extend Grafana to make it fit your needs. In this post we will take a look at how and why we would create manual InfluxDB queries in addition to the normal query builder feature.

Scaling Out a Kubernetes Cluster with more VM nodes

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 10:00:00 +0200

Intro

Following up on my last post where I built a Kubernetes cluster with virtual machines now the time has come to scale out the cluster with both master and worker nodes.

This post (and the previous one) is part of my study and preparation towards the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam where hands-on experience is key.

Update dec 2023: This post is over three years old and some things might have changed since then. An updated version of this post can be found here

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana 7 - More Dashboard Panels

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 07:00:00 +0200

Intro

This is the seventh part of a blog series about Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana where we use vSphere performance data as our metric data.

In the last post we discussed the Stat Panel, one of the many visualization panels available in Grafana. This post will introduce some of the other built in panels, though not in the same depth as the Stat panel.

These posts build on each other, but you should hopefully be able to use them as reference if you're just jumping in to a specific post. I am using vSphere performance data from an InfluxDB database pulled by Telegraf for my examples.

Setting Up a Kubernetes Cluster on virtual machines

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 07:42:31 +0200

Intro

This post is a write up of steps needed for setting up a simple Kubernetes cluster running on (vSphere) VMs. I'm in the process of learning Kubernetes and studying for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam where hands-on experience is key.

Update dec 2023: This post is over three years old and some things have changed since then. An updated version of this post can be found here

A lot of material focuses on getting started with Kubernetes through a Cloud provider or with stuff like Minikube, but as I have access to a home lab I wanted to practice using my own environment. With that said, the cloud provider route is a great one if you want to get up and running quickly, or haven't got access to a lab environment. The Kubernetes katacoda playground can also be a good place to start

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana 7 - The Stat Panel

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 08:00:00 +0200

Intro

This is the sixth part of a blog series about Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana where we use vSphere performance data as our metric data.

In the last post we discussed how to use the Variable feature in Grafana, building on what we discussed around Grouping and Filtering. This post will introduce the Stat panel which is one of many visualization panels available in Grafana.

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana 7 - Dashboard Variables

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 07:30:00 +0200

Intro

This is the fifth part of a blog series about Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana where we use vSphere performance data as our metric data.

These posts build on each other, but you should hopefully be able to use them as reference if you're just jumping in to a specific post.

In the last post we discussed the Grouping and Filtering feature in Grafana. Now let's check out variables which we can use to filter our panels based on the selected value(s) which lets us create dynamic dashboards

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana 7 - More Dashboarding - Grouping and Filtering

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 07:00:00 +0200

Intro

This is the fifth part of a blog series about Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana where we use vSphere performance data as our metric data.

In the last post we discussed how to get Grafana connected to an InfluxDB datasource with vSphere performance data pulled by the Telegraf agent. We also created our first graph panels. In this (and upcoming posts) we will take a closer look at the possibilities in Grafana.

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana 7 - Building Grafana Dashboards

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0200

Intro

This post will be all about how you can get started with building informative and beautiful dashboards of your vSphere environment with Grafana 7.

The vSphere performance data is pulled with the vSphere input plugin for Telegraf, and the data is stored in a InfluxDB database. This post will build on the work done in part 2 of this series, but if you already have a Influx database with vSphere data you should be able to follow along.

vSphere Performance - Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana 7 - Configuring Telegraf and InfluxDB

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 08:30:00 +0200

Intro

In this second part of a "series-in-series" of blogs about vSphere performance monitoring we'll take a new and closer look at the Telegraf agent from InfluxData and the vSphere plugin that's available.

I wrote a blog post about the plugin when it was released, so I will refer you back to this for things like installing and startup, it as that haven't changed since that. The vSphere plugin was released with version 1.8.0 of Telegraf, at the time of this writing Telegraf is shipping in version 1.15

vSphere Performance monitoring with Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana 7 - Intro

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 08:00:00 +0200

Intro

There's been a while since I blogged about vSphere performance monitoring and it's been three years since I started this journey so I thought I'd revisit the topic in this new series.

In my previous posts on this topic I have mainly used my own Powershell scripts for pulling data from vCenter. I have also used the vSphere plugin for Telegraf a bit, and this is what we will use in this new "blog series in blog series". We will also use the new Grafana 7 which was released in May and as the database we will continue with InfluxDB (version 1.x).

Grafana - Importing Dashboards

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 07:00:00 +0200

This is a quick post on how we can import pre created dashboards to Grafana. This is a nice feature which let's us get some nice visualizations very quickly provided that the data we have in our environment matches that of the dashboard creator

Normally I always create my dashboards from scratch, so for me the import feature, and dashboards created by others, is a way to get some inspiration and maybe learn how to use the data. I think that one get's more value from creating the dashboard yourself and also that you get to know the data more than by just using something others have built.

VCAP DCV Design 2020 (3V0-624) Exam Review

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 22:00:00 +0200

Finally I can say that I'm very proud of having earned the VMware Implementation Expert Data Center Virtualization achievement. This has been a long time goal for me, but something I never really have gotten around to focus on after I did the VCAP DCV Deploy exam almost two years ago.

I hadn't really planned for doing the Design exam at this time, but with the ability to do exams from home it has become easier to just quickly decide to hop on an exam, and that's what I did for this.

Site Updates - New Theme

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 10:00:00 +0200

Over the last week or so I've been revamping this site with both related posts and GitInfo, as well as updating the Hugo version and fixing some build warnings.

I have for a long time thought of changing the theme on the site as the one I used hadn't been updated for over a year (hence the build warnings) and it didn't feel quite as "crisp" as I wanted.

I did some research on the themes listed on gohugo.io and after choosing between a few I've finally settled on a new theme, the Mainroad theme by Vimux.

Now is YOUR Chance to Become a VMware vExpert

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 10:00:00 +0200

Since 2018 I have been a VMware vExpert and I must say that I am still proud and honoured of having earned that achievement. Now, YOUR chance to become a vExpert is here, as this year's second round of applications have been opened.

The vExpert program have been a huge boost for me, so in this post I will try to encourage more people to get onboard.

First, what is the VMware vExpert program?

The award is not a technical certification, the vExpert program is an evangelism and advocacy program. It is designed to promote individuals that contribute to communities with their expertise in VMware products and services.

Site Updates - Updating Hugo Version

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:05:00 +0200

For a little over one year ago I migrated this site from Wordpress to Hugo and I am still very happy about the move. I'm writing blog posts with Markdown in VS Code, verify it on my local Hugo installation on my laptop and when I'm happy I can just commit the changes and push it to Github. When a new post is pushed my hosting provider Netlify will pick up the change, build a new version of my site and update it's CDN. And when the new version is published I get notified through a Slack notification.

Site Updates - Related Content and LastMod

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0200

vSAN Specialist Exam (and Remote Proctoring) Review

Tue, 19 May 2020 11:00:00 +0200

Last week I had an attempt at the vSAN Specialist exam (5V0-21.19) and I'm happy to say I passed.

This was also my first exam done with the Pearson VUE remote proctoring option where you use your own equipment and there is a proctor watching you through your webcam. More on that later.

Preparations

As with all exams I always check the Exam Preparation Guide first. In the guide it it lists that the Minimal Qualified Candidate (MQC) has 6-12 months hands-on experience configuring, managing, and designing vSphere and vSAN. It also gives you a list of all the objectives tested in the exam, and a list of resources to use when preparing.

Deploying a Nested Lab Environment with vRA - Part 4

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 19:00:00 +0200

Over the last weeks I've worked on building out a vRA blueprint with lots of vRO workflows that deploys a nested vSphere lab environment.

I'll go through the project in this blog series. The first part covered the background for the project and the underlying environment as well as the initial vRA configuration. Part 2 covered the vRA blueprint and part 3 covered the vRO workflows that runs the extensibility. This fourth part will summarize, discuss a few bugs/quirks and describe some of the future plans.

Deploying a Nested Lab Environment with vRA - Part 3

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 22:30:00 +0200

Over the last weeks I've worked on building out a vRA blueprint with lots of vRO workflows that deploys a nested vSphere lab environment.

I'll go through the project in a this blog series. The first part is describing the background for the project and covered the underlying environment and vRA configuration. In part 2 we looked at the vRA blueprints, and in this third part we will cover the vRO workflows that runs the extensibility. Part 4 will summarize the status of the project, discuss a few bugs/quirks and describe some of the future plans

Change NSX-T Switch Profiles with PowerCLI

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 23:00:00 +0200

This post describes how to change the MAC Management profile on a logical segment or a logical switch in NSX-T.

The post is quite lengthy, if you know how this works in the UI, or just want to get to the Powershell stuff, feel free to jump ahead. If you're not interested in reading any more and want to get the script directly it's available on GitHub.

We will cover the following:

Deploying a Nested Lab Environment with vRA - Part 2

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 08:00:30 +0200

Over the last weeks I've worked on building out a vRA blueprint with lots of vRO workflows that deploys a nested vSphere lab environment.

I'll go through the project in a this blog series. The first part describing the background for the project and covered the underlying environment and vRA configuration. This is part 2 and will cover the vRA blueprint, while the next part will cover the vRO workflows that runs the extensibility. Part 4 will summarize the status of the project, discuss a few bugs/quirks and describe some of the future plans

Deploying a Nested Lab Environment with vRA - Part 1

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 08:00:00 +0200

Over the last weeks I've worked on building out a vRA blueprint with lots of vRO workflows that deploys a nested vSphere lab environment.

I'll go through the project in this blog series. This is the first part and will cover the underlying environment and vRA configuration. Part 2 will cover the vRA blueprint and part 3 the vRO workflows that runs the extensibility. Part 4 will summarize the status of the project, discuss a few bugs/querks and describe some of the future plans

Slides, Scripts and Recording from my session at the Runecast Virtual Conference 2020

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 18:00:00 +0200

This week I delivered a session at the first ever Runecast Virtual Conference on how to set up your own monitoring of vCenter Server Appliances using the REST APIs

All the scripts, the dashboard examples and the session slides can be found on GitHub

The session was recorded and can be found here

Thanks to everyone that attended and to those that wants to check out the recording.

All of my material on using InfluxDB and Grafana for monitoring vSphere components can be found here. Be sure to check out my latest post which covers some of what we discussed during the Runecast session

vExpert Cloud Management 2020

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 21:33:51 +0200

Today I got the exciting news that I was accepted and included to the vExpert Cloud Management Program

In total there are 96 members of this community which consists of people already included in the vExpert program.

The purpose of the Cloud Management sub program explained by the program manager:

The mission of the vExpert Cloud Management program is to build a community of champions that brings together the world’s knowledge of VMware Cloud Management solutions, in a globally accessible form, available across multiple languages

vSphere Performance - Revisiting VCSA Monitoring

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 12:00:00 +0200

It's been a while since my post on vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) monitoring and after having gained a bit more experience around this and with the updates in Grafana since that post I thought I would revisit that work and see if we could make some improvements.

Starting point

The mentioned blog post is pretty detailed on how I pull things from the VCSA and push it to a InfluxDB database so I won't repeat that, check that previous post for that. (It's a bit lengthy, as this post also probably will be..)

VCSA API - Exploring the Backup Endpoints

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 17:41:24 +0200

In this post I will take a closer look at the available Backup (recovery) endpoints for the vCenter Server Appliance in version 6.7.

When revisiting a previous post on VCSA monitoring I wanted to add in some information about the backup schedule, i.e is the schedule enabled?, and some information on the latest backup run.

Backup information in the management interface (VAMI)

This info is accessible in the Management interface (VAMI) where we have the Backup section.

VCSA API - Exploring the Update Endpoints

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 17:41:06 +0200

In this post I will take a closer look at the available Update endpoints for the vCenter Server Appliance in version 6.7.

When revisiting a previous post on VCSA monitoring I wanted to add in information about the available updates.

Update information in the management interface (VAMI)

This info is accessible in the Management interface (VAMI) where we have the Updates section which lists the available updates.

VAMI update page

Speaking at the Runecast Virtual Conference

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 17:26:55 +0200

In this Covid-19 crisis there are virtual conferences and meetups popping up all over the place. Very nice to see so many opportunities for folks to stay connected and gain new knowledge!

Some time ago I was mentioned in a tweet by Kev Johnson about the Call for papers opening for the first Runecast virtual conference which is held on Tuesday April 7th.

I got to know Kev when he was visiting a VMUG meeting I was hosting in Norway back in December 2018. At that VMUG I also had a session, where I discussed the REST APIs in vCenter and he thought that might be something to talk about at the Runecast conference as well.

Run vRO workflows based on vROps alerts

Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:13:42 +0100

Recently I configured the integration between vROps and vRO and I wanted to run a vRO workflow automatically when an alert in vROps triggered. This can be done as part of the vRealize Orchestrator for vRealize Operations management pack.

The integration allows for some interesting possibilities for automated remediation etc, but in this example I will use a simple workflow that posts a message in a Slack channel based on a Snapshot alert in vROps (this scenario could be solved without the vRO integration, but it's an easy way of showing the capabilities).

vExpert 2020!

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:21:12 +0100

This week the list of the VMware vExperts of 2020 was announced. Again I am very proud and humbled to be amongst the approx 1730 vExperts worldwide and the 11 vExperts from Norway. This will be my third consecutive year as a vExpert.

Send vRLI Alerts to Slack

Sun, 16 Feb 2020 14:00:00 +0100

Recently I had some issues with one of the ESXi hosts in my homelab. While investigating the issue I saw an event in vCenter and as I had recently installed and configured the integration with vRealize Log Insight I wanted to see if I could find the same event there.

I found the matching event in vRLI and also saw that the event had only happened on that specific host, and only a short time period before the host failed.

VCAP CMA Deploy 2020 Exam Review

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 21:33:41 +0100

Last week I finally passed the VCAP-CMA Deploy 2020 certification. The exam is a lab-based exam like the other VCAP Deploy exams and normally I really enjoy lab-based exams and prefer them over traditional multiple choice exams. I have done the VCAP Deploy in the DCV track and that was probably the best exam I have ever sat.

Sadly the experience sitting the VCAP CMA Deploy exam was one of the worst I've had when doing exams, more on that shortly.

vRA - Create LUN and deploy VM

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 17:00:00 +0100

Lately I've been working with a customer who wanted to automate the process of creating LUNs for specific VMs in the deployment process.

Before anyone screams out the infamous "LUNs suck", the customer are in the process of setting up a new environment based on vSAN, but their existing SAN will be used for several years so they want to make the most of it.

Back to the topic. The customer uses vRA for deploying VMs and this is working already, with some extensibility around tagging and DRS group membership.

VCAP CMA Design 2019 (3V0-732) Exam Review

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 16:00:00 +0100

Some time ago I passed the VCP-CMA 2019 certification exam. After that I have prepared for the next level, and a couple of weeks ago I sat and passed the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 7 - Cloud Management and Automation Design (3V0-732) exam and got the VCAP-CMA Design 2019 certification.

I passed with a score of 364 out of 500, and I'll be quick to mention that this was my second attempt at this exam.

Slides and recording from my VMworld session

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 16:22:00 +0100

Photo: Christian Mohn

At this years VMworld Europe I did a session on how to build a monitoring solution for the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) with open-source tools. It's a short version of the sessions I have done at VMUGs in Norway. The session was part of the VMTN/vBrownBag techtalks and was held in the VMvillage community area. The session was full and had people in the standing area as well, and it seemed the presentation was well received by the audience.

Post VMworld 2019

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 16:33:32 +0100

Another VMworld is in the books, and as always I left having a great time. The conference in Europe grows every year and this year had 14000+ attendees. Barcelona is a great venue and as this has been the home of VMworld Europe for many years now the organization of the event seems to run smoother every year.

Some people complain on having the same venue year after year, and as much as I would have loved visiting other citites in Europe, I believe the benefit of being able to repeat the "last known good configuration" is key. And anyways, I'm in it for the conference and have no or little time to do any sightseeing after all so as far as I'm conserned Barcelona is fine, especially as the conference seems to be held even later in November next year.

Speaking at VMworld 19

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 19:38:45 +0100

Last year I had one of my most exciting experiences in my career when I got to present at the VMTN/vBrownbag sessions during VMworld in Barcelona. The presentation was regarding my work around creating a performance monitoring solution for vSphere using open-source tools. The session was a sort of 30-minute summary of my blog posts around the topic which you can find here. The recording of the session can be found here

Exam Review VCP-CMA 2019

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 10:00:00 +0200

This week I sat the Professional VMware vRealize Automation 7.6 (2V0-31.19) exam which leads to the VMware Certified Professional – Cloud Management and Automation 2019 certification (VCP-CMA 2019)

In this post I will give a review of my experiences preparing for and (luckily) passing the exam. Yes I did pass, albeight with a score of 309 out of 500 and merely above the passing score of 300.

The exam

The exam consists of 70 questions and the time alloted is 115 minutes.

vRA Quick Tips - Search fields in a request form

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 15:00:00 +0200

Earlier this month I joined Proact here in Norway and as I mentioned in this post I will be focusing on automation and the vRealize products. Although automation and the concepts around it is familiar to me and something that I've been working with for a long time, the vRealize suite is not.

Some (or maybe all?) of the products can be hard to get started with and I thought I'd record some of the things I pick up along the way. There are lots of resources available on how to get started with vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRO (vRealize Orchestrator) and this post (or series of posts, who knows) will not be a step-by-step guide, it'll be more of a "quick tip" thing in no particular order. I'd like to emphazise that a lot of the stuff will probably be pretty basic and probably something most vRA/vRO administrators already have encountered and that it's based on vRA 7.x.

My Powershell tips and tricks

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 14:00:00 +0200

Recently I had an interesting dicussion on Powershell and how one chould structure script and functions. As with coding in general there are multiple ways on accomplishing your goals and there's lots of best practices and techniques. In addition these change over time, both because smart people find better and more effective ways to accomplish things, and because tools and languages evolve and become better.

I thought I would write up a post on how I think around things in Powershell, if nothing just for my own reference. If it can help others, great, but please keep in mind that there's lots of available content on best practices from people awarded and recognized for their effort in evangelising Powershell so use my post as a part of your exploration in Powershell and not the definitive truth!

New Adventures

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 12:00:00 +0200

So, it's official. As of September 1st I have joined Proact as a Senior Systems Engineer.

In my new position I will have a focus on tools and processes around integration and automation of the customers' business and their infrastructure. Tools like the vRealize suite will be essential and with my experience in automation and scripting I will hopefully be able to help our customers on their journey to a Software-Defined Datacenter.

Revisiting ESXi Provisioning

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 08:40:48 +0200

Previously I've written some posts on how to provision ESXi hosts through PXE booting and scripts. This has worked well and we have been using this to provision lots of physical ESXi hosts. There's however a couple of drawbacks to this approach in our environment. There is some complexity involved in setting up and maintaining the server(s) needed, and in our network setup in doesn't scale very well.

I had considered using Custom ISOs previously, but stopped because of two reasons: With creating a iso image for a specific host we would need to have 350+ MB images for x hosts lying around and I can imagine that we could get in some unessecary discussions with some support engineers over using "custom" images.

VMUG Leader!

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 21:47:38 +0200

I have been attending VMware User Group (VMUG) meetings for a number of years, but in the last few years I've become more active with doing a number of presentations.

The opportunity to present in a local community is a great experience. For me it has helped me grow in a number of areas, both technically but also personally. Through my presentations and contributions in my local User group, a long with the content I've created and shared through my blog, I was given the VMware vExpert award in 2018 and it was renewed in 2019.

VMUG Norway session - REST APIs for the VMware Admin

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 08:59:14 +0200

This week I have been on a "VMUG Tour" visiting the Norwegian VMUG branches in Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim. I did the same last summer and had lots of fun so I was excited for this years tour as well.

The topic of my session was partly an extension of the stuff I did last year where I showed how to create a Performance monitoring solution for your vSphere platform and other parts of your infrastructure with open-soure tools like InfluxDB and Grafana.

VMUG Tour

Mon, 27 May 2019 18:58:10 +0200

Next week I'll set out on a "VMUG tour" where I'll attend and speak at both the Trondheim, Bergen and Oslo branches of VMUG Norway.

I did the same last summer and that was an amazing experience so I'm really looking forward to this tour.

The focus of my session this year will be on vSphere REST APIs where I will give an introduction to REST and how you can utilize it when working with a vSphere environment. The title of the talk is "vSphere REST APIs for the VMware Admin" and I'm aiming it at virtualization admins with little experience at working with APIs.

HPE Oneview Global Dashboard Powershell Module

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 17:08:38 +0200

Earlier this year I attended the HPE Technology Solutions and Summit conference in Paris. This is a great technical event for HPE Employees, Partners and Customers. My focus this year was around automation and the developer side of things so I attended quite a few of the HPE DEV sessions and workshops.

In one of these workshops we worked with the fairly new HPE OneView Global Dashboard REST API and discussed working with the API through both Postman and Powershell. I was surprised to find that there was no Powershell Module available for Global Dashboard since HPE has been creating modules for other products, like OneView.

vSphere Performance - Visualizing data around the world with the Grafana Worldmap panel

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 14:30:00 +0200

Here's a follow up on my vSphere Performance data blog series. We're always looking out for new ways to visualize our performance data. Most often to aid our troubleshooting or awareness, but sometimes most for fun. The following example is more of the latter.

We have some installations around the world, and there will be more going forward, and we pull performance data from these in the same way as we do with our local datacenters. I have previously been working with visualizing the utilization of our network connection across our datacenters and looked at showing these in a map.

Monitoring url endpoints with Grafana, Azure and more

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 10:23:17 +0200

After moving my blog to the Hugo platform hosted on Netlify I lost the uptime monitoring I had through Jetpack on Wordpress. I had Jetpack connected to my wordpress blog and got a service monitoring if my site was up or down. I would get an email if the site wasn't responding, but not more than that.

As I've worked quite a bit with Grafana I knew about their Worldping service, but I haven't had any real need to test it before now. Now I had the perfect reason for checking it out as well as look at some alternatives.

Moving to Hugo

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 10:00:00 +0100

Last weekend I completed the preparations for moving this blog from Wordpress to Hugo. I have been considering this a few times, but never really had the time or energy to go the full length.

Wordpress have served me well for the few years this blog has run, and for most people WP is a great way to get up and running with a blog. There are thousands of themes and plugins available where you can tailor your site to fit your needs and like.

iLO Amplifier finally connected to InfoSight

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 22:45:00 +0000

HPE launched their InfoSight for servers back in January and as we have been using InfoSight for both Nimble and lately for our 3PAR systems we wanted to bring our compute into the mix as well.

As I discussed in this previous post that requires you to have iLO Amplifier Pack installed in your environment, and that you add your servers there. The post shows also how you install and configure Amplifier Pack and also shows that you now can add in servers even if they are managed by HPE OneView.

Second time vExpert

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 19:55:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I got the exciting news that I was accepted as a VMware vExpert for the second time.

This award is a huge achievement for me and I'm humbled to be included in a community with so many top individuals, many of which I have learned so much from over many years.

In total there are 1750 vExperts worldwide, and I am one of 12 based in Norway.

PXE boot and install ESXi 6.7 U1 - remember to use correct boot files

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 11:30:54 +0000

This is a short revisit of an earlier blog post on automating ESXi installation through PXE booting and Kickstart scripts.

In that post we configured a solution for installing 6.5 U1 and that have served me well for a while. Although we have our hosts on newer builds and versions we like to install them with the same image and then run through the patches so that all hosts in the environment are configured in the same way.

It's a pass - Thoughts on the VCAP DCV deploy exam

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 11:00:11 +0000

Late last week I finally got my results from the VCAP DCV deploy exam which I sat mid-December.

I was of course extremely pleased to learn I had passed the exam.

In this post I will share some of my thoughts on the exam.

Certification badge

Exam guide / blueprint

There's lots of preparation resources available and lots of guides already written so I won't go in to specifics on the different exam objectives, but I'll list the resources I've used.

Installing iLO Amplifier Pack

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 11:00:12 +0000

HPE recently announced that their HPE InfoSight service now supports servers. This is something we have been waiting for and we're eager to check out the new functionality.

The server integration in InfoSight requires iLO Amplifier Pack to be installed and integrated with InfoSight.

In our environment we are using HPE OneView to manage our servers so the Amplifier Pack isn't something we have tested as some of the functionality is overlapped in OneView. When the Amplifier pack came out I seem to recall that you couldn't add in a server which was also managed by OneView. This makes sense since both products can make changes to the servers. Now in Amplifier pack version 1.30 adding OneView controlled servers are supported, they will be set in a "monitored" state meaning that changes is stilled controlled by OneView.

HPE PDU Powershell module

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 15:00:06 +0000

As a follow-up of my exploration of the HPE PDU REST API I wanted to create a Powershell module as a wrapper for the API.

I've previously written a post on how to create a Powershell module as a wrapper for an API here. The PDU module will be built in the same way where there will be a private function that handles the actual API requests.

Note! Update 2024-04-02: This blog post was created over three years ago. I have been getting some comments on the API calls in this post is obsolete and that things have changed on the PDU APIs. Please refer to the latest documentation for your hardware to get updated information about how to work with your units

Automating two-node vSAN cluster setup

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 09:05:24 +0000

In a previous post I described how we are setting up remote offices for a customer with two-node vSAN clusters. I meant to get this post out right after that previous one, but things happened... Anyways, here's how we automated those two-node vSAN clusters.

Currently we have 7 of these racks ready with more to come. As these will be installed at distant locations we are extra keen on knowing that they are all configured as they should, and that the configuration is the same cross these multiple locations.

Slides and script from VMUG session in December

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 09:11:24 +0000

I had the pleasure of giving a talk about how to do monitoring of the vCenter Server during the VMUG Oslo meeting in December. The session was an extension of what I presented during the VMUG meetings in May and the vBrownbag session during VMworld Europe.

The demos showed how we can get health status and metrics from a vCenter Server Appliance utilizing the new REST APIs shipped in 6.5 and 6.7. During the session I built out a Grafana dashboard with version and uptime information about the vCenter, the health status, vCenter service status, disk utilization and CPU/Memory utilization.

vSphere Performance - vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) monitoring

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 11:00:46 +0000

This post is a (late) follow-up on a previous post I did about exploring the monitoring endpoints of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), and an addition to the vSphere Performance blog series.

Now we will add performance metrics and health status of the VCSA to our monitoring solution. We'll utilize the REST APIs in vCenter and feed the data into our Influx database and visualize it in Grafana.

In vCenter we have the Appliance Management page also refered to as the VAMI. We will use this as a blueprint of what we want to visualize, but we'll try to fit the important parts into a single Grafana dashboard.

Exploring the HPE G2 PDU REST API

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 10:00:05 +0000

Lately I've been playing around with the Redfish based REST API in the HPE G2 Metered and Switched Power Distribution Units.

Through the API you are able to pull some details about the PDU as well as different utilization data. Based on your PDUs capabilities you should also be able to control different outlets. My focus has been to pull some details about the PDUs, and to pull the load on the different segments.

Automate disabling of IPMI over LAN access on HPE iLO

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 16:27:27 +0000

This article will describe how you can disable the IPMI over LAN access on HPE iLO.

The IPMI protocol can present a security vulnerability where the authentication process for IPMI requires a server to send a hash of a user password to the client before authentication. This is not a new vulnerability and since this is a part of the specification of the protocol there is no fix for it besides disabling it or accepting it.

Extending the firmware repository in HPE OneView

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 11:49:20 +0000

This is a short post on how to extend the internal firmware repository in HPE OneView.

The procedure is documented in the installation guide for 3.0, but if you are like me chances are that you don't have that lying around so I thought I'd write up a short post on it for future reference.

The process is pretty straight forward:

Shut down the appliance
Extend the hard disk to 275GB*

Slides from my VMworld session

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 11:00:59 +0000

Last week I did a session about Performance monitoring at VMworld Europe in Barcelona. The session was part of the VMTN Techtalks with vBrownBag.

The slides (without the video demos) and the script used in the demo is available at Github.

The session was recorded and can be seen on Youtube.

Thanks to all that attended the session and to those watched it live on Twitch or have seen the recording afterwards. Also thanks to vBrownBag for giving me the opportunity.

VMworld 2018 comes to an end

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 10:07:51 +0000

VMworld 2018 is over. As always I'm leaving with lots of great impressions and lots of content to digest and further explore over the coming weeks.

I think it has been even clearer after this year that VMware is focusing on their Cloud strategy together with partners like AWS and IBM, that vSAN is the storage solution they want you to go forward with and that together with NSX this will be the base for the future.

Upgrading the VCSA and converting to embedded PSC

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:43:20 +0000

This week I've been playing in our vCenter lab and tested the upgrade to 6.7 U1 and also changing the deployment type to vCenter with embedded PSC.

I must say that the vCenter team has done a great job on the upgrade process over the last year. Both our migration from the Windows vCenter to the VCSA as well as the upgrade of a VCSA works well and there are lots of great documentation.

Industrialising remote offices with VMware vSAN

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 12:00:23 +0000

Recently we received lots of new hardware destined for a customer that has multiple locations world-wide.

They need a robust server solution for their production environments locally. The environment is small in terms of number of VMs, but there is high demands on the environment and we need local hardware at the sites as the connections to these sites varies and they are not fast enough at all times.

Lots of racks

vSphere Performance data - New vSphere plugin for Telegraf

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 12:22:02 +0000

Recently there was a new release of Telegraf, a monitoring agent from the guys that built InfluxDB. This new version, 1.8.0, comes with a plugin for vSphere which I'm pretty excited about!

Previously I've been testing Telegraf for monitoring some Linux VMs and also my InfluxDB servers and the agent works as expected and it's as easy to use as the other products in the TICK stack from Influx.

If you've followed my blog series about building a monitoring solution for vSphere and other infrastructure components you know that I've pulled metrics with PowerCLI scripts. With this new plugin to Telegraf I want to see if I can use this as a replacement.

Speaking at VMworld Europe 2018

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 11:27:28 +0000

The schedule builder for VMworld Europe 2018 in Barcelona is finally live and sessions can be scheduled.

For the first time I will have a session at VMworld, as one of the vBrownBag/VMTN community sessions, and I'm really excited about this.

It is very cool that these community sessions are available in the schedule builder and can be scheduled as other sessions. My session is:

Realtime Performance Monitoring - For FREE [VMTN5524E]

HPE iLO affects ESXi management agents - hosts in "not responding"

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 11:00:40 +0000

The last months we have had several issues with ESXi hosts going in a "Not responding" status. The VMs are still active and online in this scenario, but the ESXi cannot be managed. This also affets backup as it won't be able to reach the VMs through the APIs.

Previously we have normally just restarted the management agents on the host and it has been able to connect to vCenter and after this we have managed to migrate the VMs off the host. Lately this hasn't worked and we have been forced to boot the host with the result of the VMs getting rebooted by HA and eventually started on a different host.

Exploring monitoring endpoints in the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) REST API

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:00:22 +0000

For a long time, actually since we migrated to the VCSA in 6.5 last year, I've wanted to utilize the REST API in the appliance to have some monitoring of them.

For several reasons I've had to put that on hold, one of them being that there seems to be something wrong with the back-end authentication calls. I get authentication errors on certain calls no matter which user I am logged in with (also the vsphere.local admin account).

You're in!

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 08:04:53 +0000

This month I was accepted as a vExpert for the first time! In total VMware announced 233 new vExperts this summer for their second half announcement in the program.

The vExpert program is not a technical certification. VMware states: The judges selected people who were particularly** engaged with their community and who had developed a substantial personal platform of influence in those communities**.

I am very proud and honored to be included in this community. I have for a long time consumed the content produced by many of these great contributors and talented individuals and now to be a part of the same is humbling but also a great achievement for me.

VCSA 6.7 Upgrade error - The mystery of how the installer connected to the wrong VM

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 14:24:32 +0000

When trying to upgrade our lab vcenter from 6.5 to 6.7 this week we encountered a strange error.

Our lab environement is running vSphere 6.5 on VCSA and we are running with an external PSC. So when starting the upgrade of the PSC I got an error early in the process, while connecting to the source VCSA.

Error when deploying appliance

I had remembered that I've seen some strange errors before if the root password of the appliance was expired. This was not the case here, but I did change the password and reboot the appliance to see if that solved the problem.

Upgrading to HPE OneView 4.1 - Failed!

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 12:44:08 +0000

After the release of the new and shiny version 4.1 of HPE OneView we have tried to upgrade one of our (smaller) OneView instances.

The update process is usually quite straight forward and it gets better in every release. The upgrade to 4.0 from 3.x had some issues with certificate handling post-upgrade, but it was manageable.

The upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1 should not be affected by the same so I had great hopes about a smooth upgrade.

Automating disk limits in vSphere

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Following up on my last post on Limiting disk i/o in vSphere we will now see how to automate this.

First off we need some way to identify what limit a specific disk should have.

You can do this in multiple ways, you could use an external source, you can use Tags or as we've done, Storage Policies.

All our VMs and VMDKs have a Storage Policy to control the Storage it will be compliant with. We have named our policies so we can identify what kind of limit it should have. We can now use this to set the limit corresponding to the policy.

Release of HPE OneView 4.1

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 10:30:37 +0000

Recently HPE released version 4.1 of their management platform, OneView.

We use OneView extensively in our environment and are always looking out for new functionality and features in the product.

Version 4.1 comes with some new promising features.

Secure remote troubleshooting with Remote Technician
Reduced downtime for firmware and driver updates for HPE ProLiant servers
Simplified cluster management and rolling updates

Especially the ability to schedule firmware upgrades and rolling updates on a vSphere cluster sounds exiting and are very welcome. I have hoped and asked for scheduling of firmware directly in OneView for a long time without the need for external componens like the Smart Update Tools (SUT) VM.

Working with disk limits in PowerCLI

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 11:00:02 +0000

This will be a post following on the previous one on how to control disk i/o in vSphere

That post showed how you set IOPS limits either through the UI or with PowerCLI.

Even though you set the limit on individual disks you need to work through the VM. And when you retrieve the disk limits for a VM you'll get back limits on disks identified by the device key and not the label.

Limiting disk i/o in vSphere

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 12:30:04 +0000

As a Service provider we need to have some way of limiting individual VMs from utilizing too much of our shared resources.

When it comes to CPU and Memory this is rarely an issue as we try to not over-committing these resources, at least not the Memory. For CPU we closely monitor counters like CPU Ready and Latency to ensure that our VMs will have access to the resources they need.

Customizing ESXi installation with kickstart files and PXE boot

Sat, 09 Jun 2018 21:40:20 +0000

This blog post will be building on a previous post where I built a small PXE server environment for ESXi installation.

In this post we will enhance the PXE install with customized kickstart files specific for the hardware we want to install.

There's two new components to discuss here. The kickstart file (ks.cfg) it self and how to point to it during PXE boot.

Let's take a look at the current environment

The tftp server root is located at /var/lib/tftpboot and my images is stored as directories under this directory. The default (and at this point only) PXE menu is configured in the pxelinux.cfg/default file (used in legacy PXE boot)

Slides and scripts from VMUG sessions

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 07:40:29 +0000

I had the privilege of delivering 3 sessions at VMUG Norway this week in Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen.

With the extremely nice weather in Norway this week in mind the attendance were great and as always the discussions were valuable.

My session on vSphere Performance monitoring were the short version of the blog series I did about how we built our solution for doing performance monitoring of vSphere with InfluxDB and Grafana, and how we easily can customize with adding metrics and datasources.

Speaking at VMUG Norway

Mon, 14 May 2018 12:00:41 +0000

I'll be speaking at VMUG Norway's meetings this May.

As always there will be "three sessions in three cities".

Oslo, May 29th
Trondheim, May 30th
Bergen, May 31st

The topic for my session will be how we have built our own vSphere Performance monitoring solution which I've also done a blog series about.

The VMUG meetings are free, for more information check out https://www.vmug.com/norway. I hope you're able to join!

Monitoring FreeNAS with InfluxDB and Grafana

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 19:38:19 +0000

At work I have done some monitoring projects which I've done many blog posts about. At home I have a small vSphere environment serving partially as a Lab but it also runs some services we use at home. Of course I do monitoring of this environment as well, and I use both InfluxDB and Grafana as we do at work.

One of my VMs runs Plex Media Server and recently I moved my media library to a separate box running FreeNAS. I've used FreeNAS as a part of my lab earlier as an ISCSI target and serving storage for VMs, but it's now only serving my media files to the Plex VM.

vSphere Performance data - Monitoring VMware vSAN performance

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 11:06:41 +0000

In my blog series on building a solution for monitoring vSphere Performance we have scripts for pulling VM and Host performance. I did some changes to those recently, mainly by adding some more metrics for instance for VDI hosts.

This post will be about how we included our VSAN environments to the performance monitoring. This has gotten a great deal easier after the Get-VSANStat cmdlet came along in recent versions of PowerCLI.

Building a PXE boot environment for ESXi

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 12:18:14 +0000

In our environment we run ESXi primarily on HPE Proliant servers. We use OneView for managing the hardware it self (i.e. monitoring, firmware), but for provisioning ESXi to the servers we have been doing some of it manually and some of it with HPE Insight Control Server Provisioning (ICsp).

When preparing for deployment of a new batch of servers we found that Proliant Gen10 servers is not supported by ICsp. Furthermore after an unofficial chat with a HPE employee it seems that it won't be anytime soon either. There is a new major version of OneView coming, version 4, which has more features and integrations than before, but from the publicly available FAQs I can't find anything about it supporting OS deployment

Automating iLO config and OneView setup for HPE servers

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 09:00:10 +0000

We have quite a few Blade Enclosures with BL460c server blades in them and have been happy with those. For managing these we are primarly using HPE OneView and in some cases the Onboard Administrator (OA).

Our latest batch of new hardware however was DL360 and DL380 rack servers. These will also be managed by OneView primarly, but initially we need to do some iLO config on each server which in the case of blades are done by the OA. They will also have to be added to OneView manually while the blades would be brought in automatically from the chassis. With lots of new servers to configure this is a tedious process, and there are risk for errors and inconsistency when doing it manually.

Running Grafana on the Red Hat Openshift Container Platform

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 09:00:04 +0000

Last year we started building our own solution for Performance Monitoring of our Infrastructure platform with the focus on the VMware vSphere environment. The components used for this solution is PowerCLI for extracting the metrics, InfluxDB for storing the metrics, and Grafana for presenting the metrics.

I did a Blog series on this project which explains in detail what we did when building the solution.

The solution has been very well received and are used daily by many of my colleagues, and we frequently update the solution with new metrics and dashboards.

Import-SpbmStoragePolicy error - Object reference not set to an instance of an object

Fri, 16 Mar 2018 11:04:05 +0000

In a previous post I've talked about issues in the StoragePolicy and Tag cmdlets in PowerCLI. I found a workaround by ignoring certificate warnings and setting my date format to en-US.

Today I tried to replicate some Storage Policies from one vCenter to another and I found that I got new errors...

I can export the policies without issues, but when I try to Import the policy to the new vCenter I get the following error: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". Update 2018-04-06: VMware has confirmed the issue and stated it will be fixed in PowerCLI 10.1

Creating a Powershell module as an API wrapper

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 15:30:48 +0000

We all love today's modern web with lots of API's available, both for retrieving information from various sources, gaining additional insights and for transform and enrich your data. Most API's today are RESTFUL, meaning that they should follow the REST principles. REST is not a standard, it's more a guideline for how to design your API.

With the REST guidelines in place many API's share the same or similar structure and with that it gets easier to work with API's as you can make use of the same techniques. If you're familiar with Windows Powershell this is one of the easiest ways of exploring an API.

HPE OneView 4 - First look

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 15:50:06 +0000

HPE released it's 4th version of their OneView management appliance late in December. While version 3 was a great deal better than v2 and v1 I have some expectations on this release as well.

I think all versions have had value and the new features and functionalities presented has been for the better. Still it wasn't until version 3 I really felt that it was a solid product.

We've run v3 for almost as long as it has been available and have been happy with it. But, as always, there have been some features missing which we would like to se in the product. Our primary needs would be:

Exploring the TICK stack

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 13:38:18 +0000

For those of you that have read my blog you probably know I've done a series on performance monitoring infrastructure with the help of InfluxDB.

InfluxDB is a part of the TICK stack delivered by InfluxData. All components are open-sourced and available. The TICK stack consists of, Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf and Kapacitor.

This post will do a quick review and some examples on how I have started exploring them in my Performance monitoring project.

Firmware update HPE Onboard Administrator

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 11:15:39 +0000

In our environment we have several HPE Blade Chassis systems. The chassis is managed with the Onboard Administrator (OA) which consists of one or two management modules.

Like all other hardware these modules have components that needs firmware to run. And firmware needs to be kept updated to fix bugs, add features, new hardware compatibility and mitigate security risks. It's also a good thing to keep it pretty close to the iLO version updates on your blades as I suspect HPE might not test newer iLO against a lot of old OA version. However I haven't found that kind of compatibility matrix.

OneView crash - Error in log file content

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 14:37:33 +0000

This weekend our primary OneView appliance crashed.

This particular OneView appliance handles 10 blade chassis and over 120 blade servers

As OneView handles only the management side of the hardware nothing in production was affected by this crash.

TLDR; There is a bug in version 3.10.04 which doesn't delete expired sessions. This is fixed in version 3.10.07

A few troubleshooting steps was taken initially.

First we restarted the appliance, it took a while but it stopped when loading it's resource managers and threw the same error
We also gave it some more CPU's and more RAM to see if it was a resource issue, after powering on the VM it eventually threw the same error

Unfortunately we are not doing backups of the appliance from OneView. We have only been doing VM backups through a 3rd party backup solution. We should of course have done the OV backups, but when OV was configured initially (the appliance were installed on version 1.20) there was no way to do scheduled backups from OV it self and even though we have upgrade to newer versions which has Scheduled remote backups it hasn't been configured.

Some InfluxDB gotcha's

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 11:00:18 +0000

If you've followed my vSphere performance data blog series you probably have noted that I used InfluxDB as the database for storing the performance data.

With over 4 months of performance data in the InfluxDB I've picked up some gotcha's along the way (there's probably more lying around which I've not come over yet).

In this blog post I'll outline what I've learned so far

(Save) Disk space

One of them is of course, and this is an obvious one, the amount of data and the corresponding disk space needed to store it.

More DRS group automation

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 14:00:21 +0000

Following up on my last post on Automating DRS Groups with PowerCLI I found that we also need to automatically remove VMs and Hosts from a given DRS Group.

Although I could have included this in the previous script which creates the groups and adds members I wanted to separate them. There could for instance be times when you would like to run such a script on a different interval than the one that adds members as well as other scenarios. I believe it's also a good practice to build smaller scripts and functions that have more specific tasks. You could argue that the creation script also could be split up into a part that creates groups and a part that adds the members, and even maybe further splitting Hosts from VMs but that would be a future task.

Automating DRS groups with PowerCLI

Fri, 08 Sep 2017 13:11:31 +0000

In vCenter we have lot's of DRS functionalities. I won't go into all of them here, you'll probably know about most of them already.

This blog post will talk about the VM/Host affinity functionality, i.e. rules to keep VMs running one or more specific host(s).

There is multiple use-cases for this. You might want to keep some VMs together on the same host to minimize latency, maybe you are doing some port mirroring and so on. In my scenario the use case is keeping some VMs on specific hosts for license compliance. Licensing is a huge topic and are always subject to change so this might not be a use-case in the future.

vSphere Performance data – Part 8 – Wrap-up and next steps

Wed, 23 Aug 2017 13:00:33 +0000

This is Part 8 and last part (I think...) of my series on vSphere Performance data.

Part 1 discusses the project, Part 2 is about exploring how to retrieve data, Part 3 is about using Get-Stat for the retrieval. Part 4 talked about the database used to store the retrieved data, InfluxDB. Part 5 showed how data is written to the database. Part 6 was about creating dashboards to show off the data. Part 7 added more data to the project. This part will try to wrap up and look at some future steps.

vSphere Performance data – Part 7 – More data

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 13:05:04 +0000

This is Part 7 of my series on vSphere Performance data.

vSphere Performance data – Part 6 – The Dashboard(s)

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 13:04:14 +0000

This is Part 6 of my series on vSphere Performance data.

As I talked about in Part 1 I had decided to go with Grafana as the front-end. Grafana is an open source software for time series analytics which can make use of several datasources, making it the perfect match for the data in my InfluxDB.

vSphere Performance data – Part 5 – The script

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 07:30:53 +0000

This is Part 5 of my series on vSphere Performance data.

Part 1 discusses the project, Part 2 is about exploring how to retrieve data, Part 3 is about using Get-Stat for the retrieval. Part 4 talked about the database used to store the retrieved data, InfluxDB. This one will do some actual work and will retrieve data from vCenter and write it to the database.

The last post showed how to write some data to the performance database InfluxDB through its API. As Powershell is good at interacting with APIs this is what I will use for writing the data.

Issues with Get-Spbm* PowerCLI cmdlets and vCenter 6.5

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 09:01:57 +0000

We are using Storage Policies on all VMs in our environment and rely on those to give the VM's the correct storage. Storage Policy based management is a key area for VMware going forward it seems, especially with things like vSAN and VVOL.

In addition to matching a VM and it's storage we are using the policies to set limits on the VM's. We have a shared environment and we have to have some limitation on the VM's so that one VM couldn't impact all the others. To ensure this we have a couple of scripts that retrieves all VM's and their corresponding policy and based on the policy naming convention we are setting IOPS limit and the Bandwidth Cap for that VM. The scripts has been working for a long time, aside from some bugs with the limits it self which VMware support is looking into.

vSphere Performance data – Part 4 – InfluxDB

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 16:03:21 +0000

This is Part 4 of my series on vSphere Performance data.

Part 1 discusses the project, Part 2 is about exploring how to retrieve data, Part 3 is about using Get-Stat for the retrieval. This post will be about the database used to store the retrieved data, InfluxDB.

The last post left of with the beginning of a script that had retrieved data from vCenter. Before I can finish that script I need to have somewhere to put that data. As I discussed in Part 1 I had decided to use InfluxDB for this purpose.

vSphere Performance data - Part 3 - Get-stat

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 15:49:39 +0000

This is the Part 3 in my series on vSphere performance data.

Part 1 discussed the project, Part 2 was about checking the methods of retrieving data and ended with me realizing I would use Get-Stat against all (4000) VMs to retrieve data. Part 2 was posted over a month ago as I have been busy preparing for the VCP 6.5 DCV exam (which I passed btw) as well as upgrading/migrating our vCenter servers, but I have actually been able to do a lot of work on this project as well so there will be some updates in the next couple of days.

Differences and bugs in Windows 2016 Task Scheduler

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 15:44:32 +0000

I'm using the Scheduled Tasks functionality in Windows Server quite extensively. I have tasks for importing stuff to a database with Powershell scripts, running some cleanup scripts etc

Almost all of my scripts run on different intervals during the day. Some maybe just once a day and some might run every x minutes.

Recently I encountered a difference in the way Scheduled Tasks work on Windows Server 2012R2 (and below) and on Windows Server 2016.

vSphere 6.5 upgrade – vCenter server. Check your database size

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 12:21:04 +0000

In my last post about upgrading vCenter to 6.5 I've outlined the steps I needed to do for the migration. Both pre-migration, the actual migration and some post-migration steps.

Today we were about to upgrade/migrate one of our oldest and biggest vCenters which presented some additional steps to consider for the pre-migration checks and tasks. This is also described in the VMware documentation so it shouldn't be a surprise to those reading that before migrating.

vSphere 6.5 upgrade – vCenter server

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 12:16:39 +0000

In a previous postI talked about the upgrade of our vSphere environment. The first post described the upgrade and migration of the Platform Services Controller (PSC) from a version 6 running on Windows to a 6.5 Appliance.

Our upgrade path would be PSC -> vCenter -> Hosts. Our environment consists of several vCenters so this will take some time and we might upgrade hosts in a vCenter that has been upgraded to 6.5 before we finish upgrading all vCenters to 6.5

vSphere Performance Data - Part 2 - Retrieve data

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:44:17 +0000

This is part 2 of my vSphere Performance Data series. Part 1described the project and my goals with the project.

This post will be my thoughts on retrieving performance data from our vSphere environment. As I described in part 1 our environment consist of 100+ hosts and 4000+ VMs. These are hosted in 3 different vCenters in the same SSO domain (Enhanced Linked Mode). All hosts and vCenters are at version 6. We are in the process of upgrading vCenter to 6.5 as I've talked about in a previous post.

vSphere performance data - Part 1

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 08:01:38 +0000

There is lots of posts on retrieving performance data from your vSphere environment (I'll probably use a lot of them in this series), but here's my take on it.

My ultimate goal is to build my own database of performance data and have a nice front-end presenting this. I also want to have an API that extracts data from the performance DB which I will use in our in-house portals and dashboards.

vSphere 6.5 upgrade - PSC

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 08:26:55 +0000

This month we started our upgrade journey from vSphere 6.0 -> 6.5 in production. We have had 6.5 running in lab for some time after the release last fall and we have enjoyed it so far.

As a part of this upgrade we plan to migrate to the vCenter appliance on both PSC's and vCenter's as this has gotten all functionality (i.e. Update Manager), and it scales to the same extent as the Windows one.

.NET core gotcha

Mon, 08 May 2017 11:20:53 +0000

Recently I've been messing around with the new .NET Core.

I've created a class library which I'm using in an ASP.NET Core Web API.

Firstly, at least before 1.1, I couldn't add a reference to the class library just by giving it the .dll file. I needed to create a NuGet package of my library and publish it to a NuGet feed. I set up a local NuGet feed and added it as a source in VS and were able to add my code. This is all fairly easy.

Issue after migration of project.json

Mon, 08 May 2017 11:10:42 +0000

I have recently installed Visual Studio 2017 and with that started to migrate some of my .NET Core projects to the new .csproj

Check out this post by Steve Gordon to get more background insight on the migration

This looks easy enough with the migration wizard in VS. And the first try on a class library seemed to work just fine.

However when revisiting the project a couple of days after the migration I get this in VS 2017:

Orphaned files

Mon, 08 May 2017 10:01:52 +0000

A colleague asked if I had a script lying around that could investigate datastores and find orphaned files.

Well, I didn't. But instead of spending a lot of time creating one from scratch I went to our friend google and searched. There were lots of results, but I found one from Powershell guru LucD (lucd.info) and stopped searching.

The script and instructions are found here: http://www.lucd.info/2016/09/13/orphaned-files-revisited/

Be aware that the script, or more precisely a VMware VIM method that the script uses, is relatively slow.

Hello world!

Sun, 07 May 2017 22:03:12 +0000

Welcome to my blog. I'll keep this short as a Hello World should be.

This blog will be a place for me to post things that I am currently working on and that interests me. If others find it interesting that's great. Over the years I have been using different communities to my benefit so if I could give something back that would be awesome