In my home lab, I like to automate as much as possible so I can bring stuff up/down quickly. To achieve this I use several tools such as Ansible, Terraform and PowerShell. This time I decided on using PowerShell to quickly bring up VCD with the same settings every time.

This script deploys the appliance and please, edit the settings to fit your environment.

First, you need to download the VCD Appliance 10.1.1 and point the $ovfPath variable to the .ova file.

Recently, I found a configuration issue on a VMware cluster running on DellEMC hardware. Initially, they were vulnerable to the L1 Terminal Fault CVE-2018-3646, to mitigate we disabled HT in the BIOS of the hosts. As time passed, VMware released software updates to mitigate these issues. We did install the patches, but the disabled HT stayed the same. When the problem came to light, I decided to put Ansible to work as I did not want to perform manual work on the entire cluster. So the adventure begins!

In the year 2019(it feels like a million years ago, right?!), I started my VMware Certification journey. In short, I passed my first VCP6, renewed it to 2019, and passed the VMware Cloud Provider Specialist exam. After a successful 2019, I went on parental leave from November to February. Now, when I’m back in action, I need to continue expanding my knowledge and have new goals to achieve in 2020. At first, I thought about going after the AZ-103 exam because some of my colleagues are going down the Azure route, but, as I’m already a VCP, I think it’s wrong not to continue to the advanced certifications. I will start with the VCAP6.5-DCV design, and when I’m successful, I’ll continue with the deploy exam. In this post, I’ll share some of my study notes and links to the resources I use to prepare myself.

My Terraform adventures continue! In my last post, I covered how to provision a VM on vCloud Director with the help of Terraform. I’m just at the beginning of my IaC journey, but I already see the benefits of using this method to deploy infrastructure. The main advantage of using IaC is that you easily can re-use the code on multiple similar projects. When you start a new project, it’s just a matter of copying your codebase and modifying it to fit the current project. Other advantages are documentation in code, ability to have CI/CD pipeline that ties into a managed change process with approvals.

One of the things I enjoy the most in life is to learn new exciting stuff, the part I like the most is how to create. Whether it’s in the physical world such as carpentry or homebrewing(I love to brew beer!), or if it’s in the virtual computer world where I like to create infrastructure. On the other hand, I also enjoy sharing that knowledge with other people! In this post, I’ll share how to create a virtual machine in a software-defined data center(running vCloud Director) with the help of Terraform.

You are a VMware Administrator. In your data center, there’s a vSphere 6.0 cluster running rock-solid! But, with the 6.0 end of support coming up March 12, 2020, you’re forced to look into the newer version of vSphere. You may have noticed that there’s been a couple of improvements and new features since 6.0 came out. In this post, I’ll walk you through the feature called Proactive HA, released in 6.5.

If you’re like me, eager to learn and absorb all of the knowledge, you need to have a couple of useful blogs to follow. In this post, I list 5 of my favorite NetApp blogs that I follow regularly.

This blog by Chris Maki is easy to consume with it’s relatively short and relevant posts. This blog focus on NetApp products and features.

A couple of days ago, the yearly NetApp partner event in Sweden took place. When I got the invitation, I immediately accepted. But, days before, my kids got both chicken-pox and otitis at the same time, I was forced to cancel.

The day after the event took place, I got an email from one of the organizers that I did win the “Influencer of the Year”-award.

Although I’m regretful that I couldn’t attend, I’m incredibly grateful to be recognized for my efforts! I did not expect to win a prize of any kind, so I’m still in chock.

First of all, I would like to thank everyone that attended our first VMUG event in Sweden. Also, a BIG thank you to our sponsors!

At first, I was troubled that everyone would be no-shows. Then, I got overwhelmed at how many that showed up! When we had our first meeting planning the event, we had a plan and conference room for about ten people, but we were roughly 35 attendees!

I’ve stepped out of the certification room, super excited to have passed the NS0-509 exam. It was a challenge! I did pass the NCSA (NS0-160) exam before the summer, so I had some experience in how the NetApp certification program works. I’ll share my experience with the NS0-509 exam in this blog post.

Let me give you some background about myself. I started working with storage in about 2015 as a VMware admin. We had an older VMware cluster running iSCSI with HP LeftHand arrays. But, we got the task to install a new VMware-environment running DELL hardware exclusively. As a new VMware admin, it was a challenge to bring up everything, including networking, compute, and storage. Eventually, we sorted everything out and had a VMware cluster running with iSCSI storage.