William Lam

Packer reference for building PhotonOS Virtual Appliance using OVF properties

11/25/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

I was introduced to HashiCorp Packer several years back by Timo Tsugliani, who if you are not following on Twitter, you are missing a TON of really useful nuggets which this guys shares both VMware/IT related and cool stuff. I am constantly learning about new things things from Timo and this guys is just a wealth of knowledge if you get the chance to work with him. At the time, I had played with Packer for a bit but did not have an actual use case for it, so I mostly forgot about it.

Fast forward a few years later and with recent projects like the vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling, I have really spent time learning about Packer in greater depth and I now realize how powerful Packer is for building various artifacts including VMware-based templates that is not only easy but consistently from source control. It took me awhile to get to the aha moment but now I use Packer for so many different things to help simplify my life.

With the recent open sourcing of our VEBA Fling which includes the use of PhotonOS and Packer, I was reminded of a blog series that I did earlier on how to build your own Linux and/or Windows Virtual Appliance using OVF properties (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3). I realized it would have been useful to have an actual reference implementation on building a very simple PhotonOS Virtual Appliance that exercises some basic OVF properties so folks could quickly get started beyond the manual steps that were documented. I was also motivated by a chat I had with Luc Dekens (Godfather of PowerCLI) last week on some of the Automation he was trying to with PhotonOS and I figured this might be something he and others could also benefit from.

Running Nested ESXi, NSX-V or NSX-T on top of NSX-T

11/22/2019 by William Lam 5 Comments

Nested Virtualization is an extremely useful tool that helps customers easily test and try out new VMware products and solutions before rolling that into a proper development environment for further validation. This is especially handy for those wanting to setup an NSX-based environment and simulating their actual deployment topology, configuration and upgrade workflows.

In this past year, I have seen a 10x increase in the number of NSX-T based questions that have come up from customers and our field, the adoption of NSX-T is definitely in full swing. As expected, questions about running Nested ESXi on top of a physical NSX-T deployment has come up and there has actually been several variations that have been asked about whether that is Nested ESXi using VSS, VDS, NSX-V or even NSX-T running on top of an N-VDS, which is the virtual switch that NSX-T uses.

Luckily all of these combinations work and just require some basic configuration changes within NSX-T. However, before I continue, let me remind folks again that VMware does NOT officially support Nested Virtualization.

vCenter Event Broker Appliance Updates – VMworld, Fling, Community & Open Source

11/21/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMworld

At VMworld Barcelona, Michael Gasch and I had the privilege of presenting our #CODE1379E "If This Then That" for vSphere - The Power of Event Driven Automation session. The room was completely packed for a 9am session on Thursday after the big VMworld Party and we just wanted to thank everyone who attended the session and for those that came up to talk to us afterwards. We really had no idea how the session would be received but from the feedback, tweets and DM's we have received and continue to receive, it looks like the session really resonated with customers. In case you missed the session or could not attend VMworld, the session was recorded and is actually available for everyone to view. You just need to sign in with a free VMworld account.

VMware Fling

For those who attended the VMworld session in person, there was a nice surprise at the very end, which I think may be a VMworld first. Michael and I have been working on a side project in our spare time called the vCenter Event Broker Appliance or VEBA for short. This solution enables customers to easily create Event Driven Automation based on vCenter Server Events and rather than just showing off some cool demos, we wanted to leave the audience with something they can actually use right now!

With a little chant that was started by Emad Younis (this was NOT planned), the audience had spoken and wanted us to publish the planned VMware Fling which we were going to release in the coming days since we had just finished the process literally the week of VMworld. I figure its VMworld, this is what customers, partners and colleagues come here for and with a click of a button and crossing my fingers, the vCenter Event Broker Appliance Fling went LIVE.

Customizing vCenter Alarm Email Subject and Body

11/20/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

One of the automated actions that can be configured when a vCenter Server Alarm is triggered is to send an email notification. Over the years, I have seen a number of requests and questions about customizing the email and whether an email template exists. I personally have not used this feature much which has been around since the introduction of vCenter Server and mainly because I have always worked in an environment where we had dedicated monitoring tools that provide notifications including emails.

Most recently, I noticed an increase number of questions around this topic and I was curious on whether a solution exists today or if this is still a gap today? A quick Google search landed me on this 2013 VMTN thread which included several workarounds that customers have found. However, the only viable "supported" and "persisted" option at the time within that thread was to use the vSphere API/PowerCLI to customize the alarm action.

While going through this exercise myself, I found that our vSphere UI has had some enhancements since that 2013 thread and I thought it was worth sharing an update in 2019 on how customers can customize both the email subject and body for vCenter Alarms. One thing to note is that there is no generic email template that can be edited, the email customizations are applied on a per-Alarm action basis and this is applicable for both vCenter Server running in a traditional on-premises environment as well as for VMware Cloud on AWS or Dell EMC.

Hands on with new AMD “NUC” platform from ASRock

11/16/2019 by William Lam 6 Comments

It has been rumored for some time now that AMD would be re-entering the embedded/small form factor (SFF) market and with their latest generation of Ryzen CPUs, timing could not be more perfect. With the rise of Edge and IoT workloads, new constraints like cost, footprint, low to no tech-touch and power consumption is now top of mind more than ever for customers.

At VMware, we certainly see interests from customers across this spectrum whether it is a traditional "ROBO" environment running a handful of Virtual Machines for a supermarket or retail chain to an industrial site such as an oil rig or factory to mobile infrastructure like a car, ship or even a submarine. On top of these use cases, personal and development labs continue to be extremely popular amongst our customer base for learning and training purposes.

Today, the Intel NUC is still by far the most popular platform due to its size, portability, cost and low power consumption for running VMware vSphere, vSAN & NSX. The idea of an AMD "NUC" kit which includes a chassis, motherboard and CPU is something that that many folks have been asking for. With the market mostly dominated by Intel, I certainly welcome AMD re-entering this market as this will certainly drive new solutions and innovations in this market. With that said, AMD has re-entered into this market and this is initially through partnerships with several OEMs/manufacturers.

Podcasts I listen to

11/12/2019 by William Lam 3 Comments

In many of my conversations with customers, partners and colleague at this past VMworld, various topics about VMware software and solutions came up as you would expect. However, there were also many other topics that were discussed such as career, education, kids, tv shows, movies and podcasts.

One question that kept coming up over and over was around which podcasts I listen to on a regular basis? Like most, I listen to podcasts to help past the time while commuting into work, especially with our lovely Bay Area traffic. I also try to use this time as an opopournity to expose myself to other things happening outside of our immediate industry whether that is Bio, Retail, Healthcare, Economics, etc. I always enjoy learning about new things, especially the stories and innovations on how certain companies or things came to be, which is always super fascinating is usually the result of being passionate and having perseverance. Below are the podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis, a few like Worklife, Serverless Chats, Command-Line Heroes and TED Talks are recent ones which I have added and have only listening to a handful of episodes but they seem interesting so far.

I am also curious if there are other podcasts folks from the community would recommend? If so, please leave a comment as I am always on the look out for new shows!

How I built this with Guy Raz

The Indicator

Planet Money

Worklife with Adam Grant

Serverless Chats

Command Line Heroes

TED Radio Hour