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1,000th post – The story behind virtuallyGhetto

12/13/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

After publishing my previous article, I realized my next blog post (this article) would be number 1,000, which is pretty insane! It has been an amazing 8 years of sharing and engaging with the VMware community and I just want to thank everyone that has supported me over the years.

Although I have a number of technical blog posts in the backlog, I thought I might do something fun and different for post #1,000. One question that I have gotten over the years, especially when talking to customers and partners in-person is, what is the story behind the name of my blog, virtuallyGhetto? I sometimes even get funny looks as customers are introducing me to their colleagues and management team when they mention the name of my blog 🙂

NSX-T Policy PowerShell Community Module for VMC

09/21/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Earlier this week I had published an article on how to get started with the new NSX-T Policy API in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), if you have not read through that guide yet, I recommend you take a look at that first as this covers the prerequisites which will be required. As mentioned in that article, I planned to add a few more NSX-T Policy API examples and now the community NSX-T Policy PowerShell includes 10 additional functions which you can see the complete list below:

Connect-NSXTProxy
Get-NSXTFirewall
Get-NSXTGroup
Get-NSXTSegment
Get-NSXTService
New-NSXTFirewall
New-NSXTGroup
New-NSXTSegment
New-NSXTService
Remove-NSXTFirewall
Remove-NSXTGroup
Remove-NSXTSegment

After importing the module, to see the list of all functions, you can run the following command:

Get-Command -Module VMware.VMC.NSXT

Using PowerCLI & vSAN Management API to list VMs w/Thick VM swap

11/17/2017 by William Lam 1 Comment

Earlier this year, I had put together a Python script using the vSAN Management API to help customers easily identify Virtual Machines which have Thick VM swap while running on vSAN. You can find the full details in Duncan's blog post here. The reason I had chosen Python over something like PowerCLI, which I frequently use now, is that I had found a bug within the Storage PowerCLI module which prevented me from accessing the required vSAN Management API.

With the release of PowerCLI 6.5.4 today, this issue has now been resolved and I have created the equivalent PowerCLI script called VSANVMThickSwap.ps1 which includes a function called Get-VSANVMThickSwap to retrieve the exact same information as the Python script.

To use the function, you simply pass in the name of a vSAN Cluster as shown in the screenshot below and the script will return all powered on VMs that have been configured with Thick VM Swap.

Thank you for voting! (Top vBlog 2017)

08/09/2017 by William Lam 6 Comments

I had been in meetings all day today and I had noticed my Twitter notifications was going nuts. It was only until my last meeting of the day, which was with Emad, did I learn what was going on. I had no idea the Top vBlog 2017 results were being announced today and when Emad broke the news that I had gotten #1 this year, I was left speechless. I want to thank everyone who voted for me, this recognition truly means a lot coming from the community, so thank you! I also want to congratulate all my fellow bloggers who were also recognized in this years Top vBlog including the special category winners.

Lastly, a huge shoutout to Eric Siebert for running the Top vBlog program and spending countless hours putting everything together, we know its not easy each year and the community really appreciates it. Of course, I could not leave out Eric Wright and Turbonomic who were the sponsors again for this years Top vBlog. Thanks for guys!

If you missed the live-stream earlier (like me), you can watch the full results below. I believe Eric will also be publishing the complete Top vBlog results on his blog soon, so stay tuned for that!

VMware Validated Design (VVD) & VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Quick References

05/02/2017 by William Lam 2 Comments

The other day, I had a customer ask about the latest version of the Ports and Protocols document that was put together by the VMware Validated Design (VVD) team which does a fantastic job of outlining all the connectivity between the products used within the VVD SDDC. It actually took me awhile to find after realizing it was posted on the VMTN Community rather than the official documentation page.

I also came across other VVD content that I thought would also be useful for customers and decided to create a VVD "Quick Reference" that organizes all of this content into a single place. In addition, I also created a nice short URL to the quick reference so you only have to remember that. After sharing this on Twitter yesterday, Ryan Johnson (TMM for VVD/VCF) got inspired and also created VMware Cloud Foundation Quick Reference which I also built a short URL for. If there is other content that you would like to see, feel free to drop me or Ryan a comment or better yet, submit a pull request on the Github page!

To access the Quick References, use the following short URLs:

Below is a quick screenshot of both the VVD and VCF Quick References:

Exclusive vGhetto discount on homelab hardware from MITXPC

04/12/2017 by William Lam 3 Comments

On a regular basis I already receive a number of inquires from both internal VMware folks as well as external partners and customers about VMware homelabs and the type of hardware that can be used. After demo'ing our recent USB to SDDC project, the requests have literally tripled! Most folks are generally inquiring BOM details and/or where to purchase the Intel NUC or the SuperMicro E200-8D.

In particular, the SuperMicro E200-8D has probably received the most amount of interest lately. In fact, I am also interested in one after having an opportunity to play with one during the Melbourne VMUG. One thing I had noticed while talking to several colleagues who have purchased this system both locally within the Bay Area as well as overseas such as Australia was that one particular reseller kept coming up over and over again. That vendor was MITXPC which is a local bay area company located over in Fremont which specializes in Mini-ITX systems.

The reason MITXPC was being used by the majority of these folks was simple, they had the best price for the SuperMicro E200-8D which was significantly cheaper than other vendors including Amazon.

Vendor	Price
E200-8D on MITXPC	$799 USD ($783.02 w/discount code)
E200-8D on Amazon	$849 USD

Having heard good things about MITXPC, I decided to reach out to them and see if there was anything special they could do for the VMware Community. I was able to get a special discount code that would offer folks an additional 2% off their entire purchase at MITXPC. For those of you who have been holding off on a refresh your home lab or itching to build your own, this is a great time! If you would like to take advantage of this offer, simply use the discount code VIRTUALLYGHETTO2OFF when you check out. I would like to give a huge thanks to Eric Yui of MITXPC for working with me on this and helping out the VMware Community.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with MITXPC.