Hi All! So this post has been a long time coming and I’ve spent the last week banging away at my environment to get it up to spec. I’m going to approach this article like I would a standard design engagement: list my requirements, risks, assumptions & constraints create a conceptual, logical and physical design… Read More »
Out of the box, CloudWatch by default monitors 4 things: CPU Network Disk Status Checks Can you tell which resource CloudWatch doesn’t monitor out of the box? Memory! (update: According to AWS technical support “Right now, you do not need to deploy anything in you AMI to monitor your instance. Metrics like memory utilization and… Read More »
When you set up a new vROps environment 2 things that you are going to want to monitor are (1) the health of the vROps nodes themselves and (2) the collection status from the vCenters that you are collecting data from. These are the steps you’ll want to perform once you’ve got your outbound notifications… Read More »
One of the good training exercises that you can do while studying for the AWS-ASA is create from scratch an Internet accessible VPC without using one of the pre-built templates. This gives you the insight into how all of the underlying pieces fit together. That way when you are troubleshooting an existing deployment you can… Read More »
I’m currently studying to sit the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification. To do this I’m (a) going through the exam blueprint, (b) writing blogs on my AWS free-tier lab, (c) watching the excellent http://acloud.guru videos. I bought the “Associate Bundle” so I plan on taking all 3 associate level courses eventually. I’ve decided to consolidate… Read More »
Now that I’ve been playing around a bit in the environment, I decided to create some alerts in case I accidentally (or on purpose) chose an option that will incur charges to my credit card. Here are the steps to set up an email alert for your AWS account. Before you create a billing alarm,… Read More »
I’m currently playing around with AWS. I’m watching the really good Pluralsight video series from Elias Khnaser on it. In it he walks you through the process of signing up for the free account (asterisks on free because depending on what you choose you CAN get charged and sometimes it’s not clear what the free… Read More »
The last in this series of posts surrounding the lab upgrade to vSphere 6.0 will be for vRealize Orchestrator. This component disappeared from view in my web client following the upgrade to vCenter Server 6.0u1, which was expected from prior inspection of the compatibility matrix at https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php. We are going to need to get this… Read More »
A big push of VMware in the past couple of years has been policy based EVERYTHING. With the move towards automating every aspect of the implementation process, from storage to compute to networking, it seems that object metadata (tags) and policy associations are going to continue to play a bigger role in every tool set… Read More »
At this point in my home lab, I have got vCenter, Update Manager, and vSphere Replication all upgraded to vSphere 6. Finally, it’s time for the upgrade of ESXi! Having the hosts up to 6.0u1 is necessary for all of the really cool things that are part of vSphere 6, including vSAN 6.1 and the… Read More »