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vAutomation Posts

Create a PowerShell Object from contents of a file

Published by luke on 20th April 2020

No doubt you already use PowerShell for a wide range of tasks and consequently are already familiar working with PowerShell objects? This post explains how to turn the contents of a file into a PowerShell object. You can then use this object for whatever you need. Say you have a file in C:\data\ with the content: hostname=file-server-1 os=Windows 2012R2 location=Digbeth city=Birmingham installed=01-06-2015 active=yes Now you create a PowerShell function that will take the above content…

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VMware NSX SSL VPN Setup

Published by luke on 7th April 2020

SSL VPN is a brilliant under utilised feature of VMware NSX. Easy to setup, allowing users access to an environment, you can even do more advanced setups by coupling with the context-aware micro-segmentation features of NSX. This tutorial will explain how to setup a NSX SSL VPN. NSX 6.4.5 was used for this tutorial, other NSX versions follow the same setup but you may notice some differences as you go along. You can use an…

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SSH User and Key Management

Published by luke on 3rd April 2020

Managing users and more importantly SSH keys across numerous Linux systems can be the bane of any sysadmin’s life. There are tools out there which make this easier, however some don’t work very well, some are complicated and others are costly. All of them tend to require additional software installing and being configured. Essentially there is a simple solution, have the user’s SSH public keys stored in a remote location and have a script which…

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vRealize Automation 8.1 has arrived

Published by luke on 11th March 2020

vRealize Automation (vRA) 8.1 has arrived! Well not quite yet ? VMware announced VMware Tanzu including vSphere 7 and vRA 8.1 on Tuesday 10th March. vRealize Automation (vRA) 8.1 (along with vSphere 7) should be GA (general availability) around 1st May 2020. Keep checking back here or subscribe to my RSS feed for updates. When vRA 8 arrived it completely changed the architecture from vRA 7 and made the move towards features such as Cloud…

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Using Images on vRA Custom Forms

Published by luke on 30th January 2020

With the release of vRA 7.4 came custom forms. Custom forms remove the need for wrapping IaaS and PaaS blueprints behind XaaS blueprints. One of the many benefits is the ability to apply advanced formatting of the layout and fields, including adding images. When adding an image to a form you can set the value to a URL (as below). One of the issues with doing this is the end user who will use the…

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Install vRealize Automation 8 using Easy Installer

Published by luke on 29th January 2020

This tutorial will explain how to install vRealize Automation (vRA) 8 using the vRealize Easy Installer. There are a couple of options as you go through which I will discuss here. This tutorial assumes you are using a Windows client but it can still be followed if you are using Linux or Mac, you will just need to run the relevant installer file. vRA8 simplifies the application stack versus vRA7 by doing away with the…

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Remove Managed Machine in vRA 8

Published by luke on 6th January 2020

In vRA 7 you could remove a VM from portal management (leaving the VM in vCenter) by using the “Unregister” day 2 action. There is no such action in vRA 8. There is also no way to remove the VM using the API without it being deleted from vCenter. Fortunately there is a way but it involves directly editing data within the postgres database in the postgres pod. Accessing the postgres kubernetes pod and directly…

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Install vRealize Automation 8 (vRA8)

Published by luke on 14th December 2019

There are a couple of ways you can install vRA8 and this post will summarise them along with providing links to my other blog posts which go through the processes in detail. Easy Installer This is the easiest way to install vRA8 so the name is quite apt 🙂 There are however some limitations using this method. Firstly it will only install a single vIDM node, you will have to manual scale this out post…

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RasPiMon: Monitoring screen setup on Raspberry Pi

Published by luke on 5th December 2019

I had a requirement years ago to setup some monitoring screens for an Ops team. The screens needed to display data from various sources and the solution needed to be both easy and trouble free. I first tried to use Google ChromeCast running on a TV but the ChromeCast would always drop off and so wasn’t reliable. I opted to replace the ChromeCast with a Raspberry Pi. In order to make the solution as easy…

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Windows Server 2019 Template Issues

Published by luke on 26th November 2019

I experienced this issue when working on a particular platform, it was a weird one so thought I would document it. The Issue I had a Windows Server 2019 template that I had created and tested deploying within vCenter, no issues at all. I then proceeded to create a blueprint in vRA (vRealize Automation) to allow Windows Server 2019 VMs to be built. Tested a build and failed (timed out and deleted). Windows was just…

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