Goodbye Proact, Hello SovLabs

My time at Proact has come to an end. After a little over 3 years working for Proact in Denmark as a Cloud Architect, I decided to move on. As part of my time at Proact I have been part of several internal projects. Building the Proact Hybrid Cloud (PHC), designing & running a large Veeam Backup environment handling backup of the PHC and designing & running a Veeam Cloud Connect offering.
Besides the internal projects, I have of course also been involved with a lot of customers, primarily providing my expertise on vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator or Veeam projects.

I have been fortunate enough to get to work on some very exciting and special customer projects... Continue reading

Find vRA DataCenterLocation Compute Resources from vRO

A short time ago Christopher Lewis (@thecloudxpert) asked me for a bit of help to create a vRealize Orchestrator Action to find all vSphere based vRealize Automation Compute Resources for a specific DataCenterLocation... Continue reading

Veeam Vanguard and VMware vExpert - 2018

I am very happy and honoured to announce that I have been select to participate in both the Veeam Vanguard and VMware vExpert programs here in 2018.

Veeam Vanguard

This is the 4th year I am part of the Veeam Vanguard program... Continue reading

Connecting to Homelab using Royal TSX and PowerCLI

So now that both PowerShell Core and PowerCLI is supported on macOS, I thought I wanted to share how to easily connect to your Homelab infrastructure by using Royal TSX and PowerCLI... Continue reading

Goals for 2017 - Results

2017 has come to an end, and it is therefor time to look back on my goals for the year. Generally speaking I did not succeed with all my tech related goals of 2017 as documented below.
But on the personal side a lot of other things have happened, the wife and I had a son in February, whom is thriving. Our daughter now almost 7 years old, started school last summer and have been very happy with it.
And on top of that we had a very long remodelling of our livingroom, which is now almost finished... Continue reading

Nordic VMUG Conference

Once again the Danish VMUG Leaders have arranged for a big Nordic VMUG Conference. And it is only a few days away. Namely it will be held on Thursday 11th of January at the movie theater inside Fields shopping mall in Copenhagen.

The conference will be a great mix of both “superstar” international speakers and local communitity speakers.
I will do a community session called “Create scalable and reusable Code in vRealize Orchestrator”... Continue reading

Get expiration date of a vRA Request in a vRO EBS Workflow

A customer of mine wanted to do automatic documentation of deployed dev and test machines in vRA7, by creating a subpage in Confluence for each deployed machine.

One piece of information the customer wanted in the documentation was the initial expiration date of the deployed machine.

I wanted to do the documentation as part of one of the EBS lifecycle workflows in vRO.

But the expiration date is not in the Request, and it’s not in the Machine Properties... Continue reading

New energy efficient Homelab

I changed my Homelab over the course of this year.
In December I sold my old HP ML370 G5 server, which only occasionally was powered on, because of the noise and power.

So I wanted something more managable and energy efficient, that could be left powered on 24/7.

The main purpose of the small Homelab I decided on, was to have a vRealize Orchestrator “coding-rig”.
Mainly focused on vRealize Orchestrator plug-in development, to extend on my previous workflow/package work around phpIPAM.

I have documented the Homelab here: Homelab - 2017 Mid

vRA 7.3 No valid endpoints found in the Management Agent's configuration

So I messed up. I tried to be clever and failed at it.
I was deploying vRealize Automation 7.3, and as part of the deployment needed to change the SSL Certificates of the deployment.

In vRealize Automation 7.x there are at least 3 places SSL Certicates needs to be replaced/updated:

  • vRealize Automation CAFE Appliance
  • vRealize Automation IaaS Windows Server
  • vRealize Automation Appliance Management Site Certificate (VAMI)

The first 2 are done as part of the deployment, and are later on replacable from the VAMI UI of the vRealize Automation Appliance.

The Appliance Management Site Certificate it self, needs to be changed by logging via SSH and replace the cert file:

1
/opt/vmware/etc/lighttp/server.pem
... Continue reading

Jekyll to Twitter with Hashtags using Atom feed and Zapier

I have previously used IFTTT to push new blogpost onto Twitter and LinkedIn. But I was not 100% happy, so I recently switched to Zapier instead.

As part of the initial setup process at Zapier, I noticed that Zapier of cause pulled the relevant fields from my Atom feed, but also pulled some basic information directly from my website.

In this case, it pulled the Tags associated with the blogpost, although it called the field “raw_category”... Continue reading