Note: This post integrates several automation tools at once. My objective is to provide some well-documented, concrete examples of executable Ansible Playbooks, D2 Diagrams, and best practice to illustrate ways to make good documentation easy. Note: All code examples in this blog post are structured in a format to be…

Documentation is always important, but always takes too much time Ever had an issue where a new installation is completed, but there’s just no time to update the ol’ Visio diagrams? Manually composed diagrams always possess a certain art to them, but the hours per unit of documentation isn’t always worthwhile (particularly when prototyping a solution). Deploying Infrastructure-As-Code should involve…

Distributed Virtual Port-Groups (dvPGs) in vSphere are a powerful tool for controlling network traffic behavior. vSphere Distributed Switches (vDS) are non-transitive Layer 2 proxies and provide us the ability to modify packets in-flight in a variety of complex ways. Note: Cisco UCS implements something similar with their Fabric Interconnects, but…

VMware introduced RESTful APIs with their vSphere 7.0 release train; migrating from the old MOB APIs is a welcome choice. REST clients provide a powerful tool for automating processes, but it’s important to embody reliable practices when interacting with infrastructure. The neat thing about published and documented REST APIs is…

In a previous post, we covered how to create a virtual machine from a VM template in vSphere using Python and the REST API as an example of service-agnostic methods to invoke infrastructure resources. VMware’s PowerCLI is a fantastic tool, but it’s not for me. Tweaking or porting functionality from…

Ansible is a fantastic tool for Linux-based and NOS-based automation. Have you seen this error before? "changed": false, "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Host key verification failed." When you use Ansible with SSH transport (as opposed to an API), you rely on the SSH key trust…

Rapidly deploying Linux servers to meet a whim represents the essence of home lab activities, but we spend a great deal of time spinning/configuring machines to meet our specs. Worse, we lose a great deal of time keeping them properly configured and up to date, and none have the privilege…

It’s not a matter of if you will be the victim of a breach, but when. Wired is starting to track breaches by halves (as a general tech publication), and security vendors are moving to monthly reporting due to the volume. It’s 2022, and it seems everyone loves to over-share on social media. This may feel good, but introduces substantial risks. Let’s talk about cyber hygiene. …

NSX 4 is now available, and it was a surprisingly sparse release in terms of new capabilities. NSX 4.0 appears to be a “clean house” initiative, so while it’s missing “whizz-bang” new data plane features it does address a variety of issues I am happy to say are now closed: …