Life can always surprise you. For the past few years I have been chasing the dream like most to work for the “mothership” and recently the calling came.

This month, I will be joining the CPBU at VMware as a Technical Marketing Engineer focused on vSphere upgrades. I will be working alongside Adam Eckerle, Emad Younis, Kyle Ruddy, Mike Foley, Brian Graf, Nigel Hickey and more!

Nigel has it perfect when he titled his announcement “Oh the places you’ll go”. This job will include quite a bit of travel, both domestic and international, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Another lovely Friday starting off with strange issues, when taking a host out of standard maintenance we noticed that HA would not reconfigure, and kept saying The object ‘vim.Datastore:datastore-1131’ has already been deleted or has not been completely created. This was strange because no other hosts had this issue.

I proceeded to follow standard troubleshooting steps, reconfigure HA…same issue….disable HA for entire cluster and …

Happy New Year! So towards the end of the year I kind of slacked on writing some blog posts, when I finally did I realized I had no clue how to create a post. I know…I know this is terrible, however its still much better than wordpress. I stumbled across an awesome tool that would help you manage your hugo/jekyll website Forestry.io

It is quite simple, you login with your Github, Bitbucket, etc account and it can detect your existing repositories. From here, click on Add Site.

So today I successfully passed the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 – Data Center Virtualization Design Exam 3V0-624!

I had set a personal goal at the beginning of the year, that I would pass the VCAP6-DCV Design and unfortunately after months of studying I took it and failed in March. I was ready to give up based on the cost of the exam and the time i spent studying. However, I found out recently that a new version based on 6.5 was released in August and the Visio like design sections were dropped (which were the biggest pain), so I worked to acquire a voucher from work and decided …

I have been looking for a new desk for awhile. Working from home I do not get to go into an office, or walk around to meet up with coworkers. I found myself sitting for way too long which hasn’t been best for the low back and leg pains I experience.

I heard from a friend that getting a standing desk may be something that would be good. Standing desks come in all shapes and sizes but I knew from the start that I wanted a dedicated standing desk and just not a riser (one that sits on an existing desk).

So it seems to be that time of year again with new projects coming around. This time its all about vRA. This is probably my first of many blogs to come about things I have come across.

My question today was how do I pre-create a computer AD account, join a device to the domain and then clean it up when the machine is destroyed.

Turns out this is super simple in vRealize Automation 7.3!

vSphere 6.5U1 was released on July 27th. This is an incremental update a lot of people wait for before upgrading from a previous version. I have been lucky to have been running on vSphere 6.5 for quite some time and have been enjoying it very much.

Obviously we never upgrade production first, if we can help it. I decided to attempt an upgrade on one of our QA vCenters that was deployed using the VCHA Advanced workflow. I followed my standard upgrade steps Updating a VCHA 6.5 vCenter however when I went to failover the Active node to the upgraded passive/witness nodes, services would not start, …

Another New Blog Platform!

So it seems there is a bit of battle between the Jekll/Hugo/Ghost platforms. I have been trying to be a little more flexible with Jekyll and it was giving me issues, so I decided to switch to Hugo. After doing the redesign I have been getting feedback that it is much cleaner, so I hope you enjoy it too!

All links should be functional and moved nicely, if they dont work, please leave a comment!

I have been working on doing a vCenter Consolidation Project. This included migrating our systems to a new vRealize Operations Server. This particular one included 73 different vSOM keys, and as you may know there is currently no way to enter in multiple keys at a time. I reached out to Kyle Ruddy and he informed me there is an API to do this, and that started my adventure to get this working.

I have been waiting for native GUI support for L2TP vpn with local users and it is finally here! Ubiquiti Unifi Equipment now supports local radius auth using the 5.5.x code of controller! Please see below on how you can get this setup. For my example i will be using the Stable Candidate 5.5.11.

Unifi Controller 5.5.11

Configuration is quite simple! Just follow these few easy steps and you will be up in no time.