Musings of an engineer
VMware’s SDDC has a great feature whereby it can manage credentials for all the applications and appliances within its scope, such as vCenter, NSX-T, WSA, vRealize suite etc. The best part of this management is the periodic rotation feature which […]
Having a large number of iDRAC out of band (OOB) interfaces to configure on Dell hardware can seem like a mind numbing daunting task to administrators everywhere. Recently my team was tasked with the following basic tasks on around 80 […]
I haven’t done a blog for a while due to an overload of work, but I’m getting back on the horse! Earlier this year VMware released a new vRA plugin for vRO – https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2021/03/vro-vra-plugin.html. Typically a vRO plugin provides out […]
Like many others, Ansible is my tool of choice for configuring endpoints once the VM is provisioned. With the introduction of Saltstack Config (Enterprise) into the vRA bundle from 8.3, I wanted to test this as an alternative. Beyond the […]
VMware have jumped on the Terraform bandwagon and it is now fully integrated into vRA 8.2 onwards. In this blog I will go through the process of configuring vRA to deploy an AWS EC2 instance via Terraform code. I have […]
Not a moment too soon into 2021 and vRA Cloud has been updated with some essential functionality, the ability to secure values being used within ABX scripts. To date, this omission has made ABX an insecure feature, unless an on-premise […]
VMware’s Identity Manager. 🙁 A product which causes me more hassle than it’s worth (in my opinion!). I get why it’s there and when you have a mix of SAML / passwords / certs etc then its fine, but for […]
I recently had a task which required updating a large number of JSON manifest files housed within S3 folders, so that Quicksight could read and import the data. boto3 makes this achievable with just a few lines of code. This […]
When configuring vRA service broker custom forms, it is often useful to validate user values prior to the data being sent for processing by vRA / vRO or ABX actions. In order to achieve this, vRO custom validations can be […]
Hasicorp Vault is a more and more popular choice for securing credentials / keys / certificates. The API is clear and easy to use and rolling these calls into Ansible couldn’t be simpler. https://www.vaultproject.io/api-docs/secret/kv/kv-v1 I hit the use case where, […]