I had a great run at EMC Consulting. I helped advise and guide companies at all stages of transforming their IT departments from the traditional IT silo approach to providing IT as a Service via private, public, or hybrid cloud solutions. Along the way I met many good folks within the industry and made a number of friends internally and externally to EMC: great folks like JP Morgenthal, Jeff Vagg, Tal Talamoni, Vinny Delucia, Kurt DeWitt, Darryl Hadfield, Christopher Kusek, and many more.

I had a number of managers during my time, and each one was very supportive, understanding, and went out of their way to make sure that my professional needs were met while giving me as much freedom and latitude as necessary for my family. Big ups to my friend Ted Newman (@vCTO) – he’s a hell of a great guy and a fantastic person to work for.

As part of a project for an EMC Consulting customer, I was tasked with comparing a number of cloud portal/broker solutions and weighing their capabilities against the customer’s business & technical requirements. I admit the task wasn’t very easy as each product in the comparison went about things in a slightly different way; some were focused solely on public cloud or private cloud (with varying degrees of maturity or support for each public cloud provider’s services), or focused purely on the technical side of management and orchestration with little in the way of end-user focus or workflows for service placement based on the service consumer’s workload requirements. ServiceMesh met all of the customer’s business & technical requirements, and was clearly head and shoulders above all of the other solutions included in my comparison. I was aware of ServiceMesh before, as EMC & ServiceMesh have a good number of mutual customers and ServiceMesh is an EMC Select partner; however this comparison made it clear to me that ServiceMesh has done an awesome job of identifying a need and meeting it at exactly the right time in the industry.

Out of the blue, a third party recruiter contacted me to ask if I was interested in a company that sounded a whole lot like ServiceMesh. (To be clear, I wasn’t targeted or poached by ServiceMesh.) Ultimately, I am and always will be a huge nerd at heart. I wanted to get back to a hands-on technical role in order to continue the never ending journey of learning more and solving technical problems. I also missed that feeling that only a small company can provide – the knowledge that your professional contribution is key to the lasting success and upward trajectory of the company. These are some of the major reasons why I decided to make this transition. The allure of getting back to hands-on full-time nerdery, working for a privately held company that appears to be leading a very competitive market, and the opportunity to work in a tight-knit team of super nerds…well, you know the rest.

“Why did you do this?”, you might ask, and I would tell that 1.) I’m a nerd that likes to do nerdly things in order to keep the nerdly brain cells happy and well-exercised, and 2.) Glacier is a hell of a cool solution for my particular use case. Namely, “What the bloody hell do I do with 100′s of GBs (and more) of digital family photos and videos?!”

Usually, a service like Mozy/BackBlaze/Carbonite would be a suitable solution, but I store everything on a NAS and those silly companies usually pick NAS as the dividing line between consumer and business. The NAS I speak of is an Iomega ix-200, and if you’ve ever used one, you’re probably painfully aware that it’s a bit of a dog on the performance tip, so doing some fancy/lame thing like copying files off the NAS just to sync “to the cloud!” will eat up tons of local disk and be horribly slow. Slow as in, whenever it finishes, the zombie apocalypse will be upon us and I won’t care about digital photos anymore, just eating brains and trying to stay out of Rick Grimes‘ way.

Based on the above, even if I use the ever-loving hell out of Glacier, with the currently available, pricing I’ll never use more than a couple dollars a month. Pretty awesome, I think. OK, you’ve tolerated me long enough.

The code is up on Ye Olde Github here: https://github.com/sixfootdad/AWS-Glacier-SNS-PowerShell.

Be sure to check out the README and holler if you have any querstions.

There are a couple different ways to find out. One of them is specific to PowerCLI 5.0.1 and is the Cmdlet Reference. By drilling into the All Cmdlets section and locating Search-Cloud, you’ll see that the parameter named QueryType is of the type QueryType, which is a .NET Enum. Click on the QueryType and you’ll see all the cool things that you can search for using Search-Cloud. Very nice!

;

There are a few other ways to figure out what the type of parameter -QueryType is, and the expected values. One of them is quite simple, use an invalid -QueryType.

PS C:\>; Search-Cloud -QueryType me
Search-Cloud : Cannot bind parameter 'QueryType'. Cannot convert value "me" to type "VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud.View
s.QueryType" due to invalid enumeration values. Specify one of the following enumeration values and try again. The p
ossible enumeration values are "User, AdminVAppNetwork, AdminUser, BlockingTask, Cell, Host, AdminCatalogItem, Vm, A
dminCatalog, Group, AllocatedExternalAddress, OrgVdcResourcePoolRelation, AdminVApp, DvSwitch, Organization, VAppTem
plate, AdminAllocatedExternalAddress, OrgNetwork, Catalog, VirtualCenter, ResourcePool, Right, StrandedUser, Portgro
up, AdminVM, Media, AdminVAppTemplate, AdminOrgVdc, OrgVdc, CatalogItem, Event, VApp, AdminOrgNetwork, VAppNetwork,
AdminShadowVM, Datastore, ProviderVdc, DatastoreProviderVdcRelation, AdminMedia, ExternalNetwork, NetworkPool, Admin
Group, Task, AdminTask, VAppOrgNetworkRelation, Role, ProviderVdcResourcePoolRelation".
At line:1 char:24
+ Search-Cloud -QueryType <;<;<;<;  me     + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (:) [Search-Cloud], ParameterBindingException     + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CannotConvertArgumentNoMessage,VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud.Commands.Cmdlets.SearchCloud 

Another would be to find the ParameterType, which shows us it’s VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud.Views.QueryType. This can be accomplished in steps:

 PS C:\>; Get-Command search-Cloud | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Parameters

Key                                Value
---                                -----
Name                               System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
Filter                             System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
QueryType                          System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
Property                           System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
Server                             System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
Verbose                            System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
Debug                              System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
ErrorAction                        System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
WarningAction                      System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
ErrorVariable                      System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
WarningVariable                    System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
OutVariable                        System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata
OutBuffer                          System.Management.Automation.ParameterMetadata

And then:

PS C:\>; (Get-Command search-Cloud | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Parameters).QueryType

Name            : QueryType
ParameterType   : VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud.Views.QueryType
ParameterSets   : {[__AllParameterSets, System.Management.Automation.ParameterSetMetadata]}
IsDynamic       : False
Aliases         : {}
Attributes      : {__AllParameterSets, System.Management.Automation.ValidateNotNullOrEmptyAttribute}
SwitchParameter : False

And

PS C:\>; (Get-Command search-Cloud | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Parameters).QueryType.ParameterType

IsPublic IsSerial Name                      BaseType
-------- -------- ----                      --------
True     True     QueryType                 System.Enum

Now that we know it’s an enum, we can do a couple different things. The code below will list out all the names in the enum.

[Enum]::GetNames("VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud.Views.QueryType")

We’ll get effectively the same information back in this way, too.

[VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud.Views.QueryType] | Get-Member -Static -MemberType Property

My schedule is pretty packed. When I’m not attending a session, I’ll be in the VMworld Community Lounge where myself & the rest of the #vBrownBag crew will be hosting the Community Tech Talks. Check out the schedule, or grab the .ics.

The sessions I plan on attending, in order of occurrence:

As you can tell, I’m focusing quite a bit on vCloud Director and the various bits of automation that surround it. If you work for a TAP (Technical Alliance Partner, IIRC) be sure to check out the TAP only sessions. I’ve seen a bit of the future due to my day job and attending NDA roadmap briefings. From what I’ve seen so far, I’m extremely stoked for the VMware Cloud Infrastructure future!

The coolest thing about the Community Tech Talks powered by the #vBrownBag is our fantastic sponsors. In no particular order: Cisco, Veeam, Tintri, & TrainSignal have sponsored the #vBrownBag at VMworld. We’ll be handing out a very limited number of VMworld 2012 Survival Kits. These kits will include the necessary items to help you get through 4 days of awesomeness – energy, vitamins, earplugs, and (hopefully!) more. Most importantly, a very lucky 350 folks will get an awesome custom-made #vBrownBag USB key that will be packed with our best certification podcast series, the latest distribution of AutoLab 1.0, and fantastic content from each of our sponsors. YOU WILL WANT TO GET ONE OF THESE KEYS.

I hope I’ve done a great job explaining why I’m stoked about VMworld 2012. If you’re there in person, come see us at the Community Lounge. If you’re not able to make it, watch the livestream and participate on Twitter under the hashtag #vBrownBag. ‘Til then!

Example:

Get-VirtualSwitch -VMhost host1.lab.local -Name vSwitch1 | Set-VirtualSwitch -Nic vmnic4

The above code will replace whatever vmnics are currently connected to the vSwitch with vmnic4. But what if you want to remove all the nics from the vSwitch? The answer is simple; pass an empty array to the -Nic parameter.

$nic = @() //creates an empty array called $nic

Get-VirtualSwitch -VMhost host1.lab.local -Name vSwitch1 | Set-VirtualSwitch -Nic $nic

Voila!

As I mentioned, this was my second Indy VMUG, but I’m still astounded at the sheer size of the gathering and at the quality of the VMUG’s execution. There was a real sense of community, which is something that isn’t always apparent at VMUGs. Many thanks to Mike, Kyle, the other VMUG leaders, and the MyVMUG organization.

In the interest of saving you some valuable voting time; BEHOLD, a handy-dandy voting guide!

1320 PowerCLI 101
Cody Bunch, Principal Architect – Private Cloud, Rackspace
Glenn Sizemore, Technical Marketing Engineer, NetApp

1347 vCenter Orchestrator for the Everyday Administrator
James Bowling, Senior Systems Engineer, SavaSeniorCare
Cody Bunch, Principal Architect Private Cloud, Rackspace

1496 vSphere AutoLab. Build Your Personal Training and Test Lab Using the PC You Already Have Without All the Hardwork
Alastair Cooke, Trainer / Consultant, Demitasse Ltd
Nick Marshall, EUC Architect, Downer EDi

1497 Secrets of the vSphere AutoLab: How and When to Build Automation Into Your vSphere Deployment
Alastair Cooke, Trainer / Consultant, Demitasse Ltd
Nick Marshall, EUC Architect, Downer EDi

1498 Certification Preparation with the Community Lab Guide to vSphere 5
Alastair Cooke, Trainer / Consultant, Demitasse Ltd
Nick Marshall, EUC Architect, Downer EDi

1854 PowerCLI – Community Code
Josh Atwell, Systems Administrator, Cisco Systems Inc.

1856 Become a Rock Star with PowerCLI and vCenter Orchestrator
Josh Atwell, Systems Administrator, Cisco Systems Inc.

1968 Beyond Cloud Readiness: Is Your Organization Ready for vCloud Director?
JP Morgenthal, Cloud Ranger, EMC Corporation
Damian Karlson, Cloud Ranger, EMC Corporation

1996 Managing Your Day-to-Day Administrative Tasks with vCenter Orchestrator
Maish Saidel-Keesing, Platform Architect, NDS Technologies
Cody Bunch, Private Cloud / Virtualization Architect, professionalvmware.com

2318 Platform as a Service with VMware vCloud Director: As Seen from the Trenches and Ivory Towers
Christopher Kusek, Global Virtualization Lead, EMC Corporation
Damian Karlson, Cloud Solutions Architect, EMC Corporation

2356 The vBrownBag Panel: Certification Preparation By the Community for the Community
Cody Bunch, Principal Architect – Private Cloud, Rackspace
Alastair Cooke, Trainer / Consultant, Demitasse Ltd
Nick Marshall, EUC Architect, Downer EDi
Josh Atwell, Systems Administrator, Cisco Systems Inc.

The AutoLab is brought to you by APAC vBrownBag host Alastair Cooke (web/twitter), and our mad genius behind the boards, Nick Marshall (web/twitter). Its mission is simple: to provide an easy way to deploy a vSphere lab on ESXi or Workstation. If you have a laptop with about 8GB RAM and a modern CPU, then you can probably run the AutoLab! Sure, it won’t be like running a quad-socket 8 core beast with 1TB of RAM and EFD, but it’ll get you labbing, and that’s all that counts. If you’d like to get started, head over to labguides.com and download the AutoLab. I won’t go into detail on getting it setup, but I do want to outline a few minor alterations I did to get vCloud Director up and running.

First, I changed up the way Workstation manages the memory. I only have 8GB of RAM in this laptop, so overhead is a bit tight, especially if I’m running my WinXP VM as well, which I use as a personal VM inside my corporately imaged laptop. The AutoLab instructions say to go into Workstation’s Preferences menu and set the memory to “Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM”, which is essentially a memory reservation within Workstation. That approach works well, and I imagine that it helps to reduce swapping, especially on computers with spinning disks. Since my laptop runs SSD, I wanted to have more VMs running at once without having Workstation complain about running out of memory. I changed the memory setting to “Allow most virtual machine memory to be swapped”.

Another change I had to make was to increase the memory allocated to the Host1 and Host2. Staying with the default 2GB works for vSphere labbing, but once you install vCloud Director, you might want some memory available to power on VMs within vCD. I also went into the DC VM’s DHCP panel and increased the lease times. My reasoning for that is since I’m using the vCloud Director appliance; it does all of it’s setup business based on the DHCP addresses it receives at first power-on. If those addresses change, your vCD won’t run. Sure, you can go in and fix it, but it’s a PITA (IMO), so why bother?

After your AutoLab is setup, download the vShield Manager and vCloud Director appliances. The vShield Manager appliance has a EULA that goes crazy on my copy of Workstation, so I “fixed” it by unzipping the ova (it’s a zip file, after all, just a different extension), deleting the .mf & .cert files, and removing all the text between the <License> tags within the .ovf file’s XML. Before you delete the EULA, you should probably read and understand what you’ll be agreeing to. Don’t bother rezipping into an .ova, just open the .ovf file with Workstation, agree to the now non-existent license (remember, you agreed when you read then deleted it) and let the install complete. Once it finishes, change the network from Bridged to the VMnet3 you created when you deployed the AutoLab, and set the memory to 384MB instead of 3GB. Power on the vShield Manager VM and wait for the startup to complete. Login to the vShield VM using the credentials of admin/default, enter privileged mode with the en command and the password default and type setup. You’ll be presented with a setup wizard of sorts; I used 192.168.199.8 for the IP, 255.255.255.0 for the subnet mask, 192.168.199.2 for the gateway, 192.168.199.4 for DNS, and lab.local for the DNS domain search list. After the vShield Manager setup completes, go over to the DC VM’s DNS panel and create a forward and reverse lookup for the vShield Manager VM, whose hostname will be manager by default. You may also want to setup a DHCP reservation for that IP address (if you want to be extra sure it won’t lose its IP); you can find the vShield Manager’s MAC address by logging into privileged mode and issuing the command show interface.

If you haven’t installed vCD previously, or if you have previous vShield experience outside of vCloud Director, the process is a bit different when using vShield in conjunction with vCenter. First, you won’t need to register your vShield Manager VM within vCenter, as it will be controlled by vCloud Director. Second, if you need to license it for whatever reason, the licensing is handled via vCenter’s Licensing panel. vCenter becomes aware of it once you connect vShield to vCloud Director and vCloud Director is connected to a vCenter.

Next up, open the vCloud Director appliance’s .ova file and add it to Workstation. Be sure to change the two bridged network adapters over to VMnet3, or your appliance will either wait forever for an IP address, or get one from the DHCP server on your Workstation’s LAN. Either way, at this point it’s simpler just to delete the VM and start over. The vCloud Director initial setup will take a while, so be patient until it completes. Interrupting it will most likely break it, so you’ll be back to the “delete and re-install shuffle” if you’re impatient. You’ll know it setup correctly if you can browse to the address displayed on the VM console (minus the 5480 port) and see the vCloud Director setup page.

At this point you can complete the vCloud Director web-based setup, but don’t go so far as to connect vCenter. If you have any troubles with name resolution to either vCenter or your vShield Manager VM, check DNS. When that is done, hop back over to the vCloud Director VM’s console and choose the Configure Network option. Change the hostname to something other than localhost, take note of the IP addresses it pulled from DHCP, save your changes and exit the network configuration screen. Next, choose the Login option, use the root/Default0 credentials and issue the command ifconfig to get the MAC addresses for the network interfaces if you want to do DHCP reservations over on the DC VM. You will want to add forward and reverse DNS records for the vCloud Director VM.

Once all the setup is completed, you can head over to the VC VM and use that to launch the vSphere client and point the browser towards the vCloud Director web page. If the rest of your lab is up and running, feel free to connect vCenter and start building out your provider virtual datacenter.

Happy AutoLabbing!

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