vRealize Automation is useful for deploying a variety of different items as-a-service, from simple IaaS to databases to container hosts and, of course applications. And most of these have been demonstrated to date. One other piece that is often forgotten about is monitoring agents on these systems, or maybe it’s done …

vRealize Automation is a very metadata-driven system through capabilities called custom properties. These properties—which are nothing more than key-value pairs—can be applied at multiple levels throughout vRA and cause it to behave in different ways. The same sort of metadata drives a lot of decision within vSphere …

I encountered this issue in my home lab recently whereby vCSA 6.5 U1c was failing the file-based backup through the VAMI with the message “BackupManager encountered an exception. Please check logs for details.” A very generic error message to be sure, and not at all helpful. I checked the log responsible at …

In vSphere 6, the Platform Services Controller (PSC) contains a number of pieces of functionality including the SSO components, certificates, licensing, and other core parts that make vCenter function. Because of its importance, it is possible to join external PSCs that share the same SSO domain in a replication …

Introduction The topic of vSphere upgrades is a hot one with every new release of VMware’s flagship platform. Architectures change, new features are introduced, old ones are removed, and so everyone is scrambling to figure out how to move to the next version and what process they should use. There are generally two …

vSphere 6.5 was released at the end of 2016 and so, at this point, has been on the market for about a year. VMware introduced several new features in vSphere 6.5, and several of them are very, very useful however sometimes people don’t take the time to really read and understand these new features to solve problems …

For those who use vRealize Automation (vRA), you’re probably all too familiar with vSphere templates and how they are the crux of your service catalog. Unless you’re creating machine deployments anew from another build tool, you’re probably using them, and it’s likely you have at least two, sometimes many more. Using …

Although vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) is a great tool for a variety of reasons, one of the more useful abilities it brings to a datacenter is the ability to look inside the guest OS and tell you about its state. Back in 6.2 or maybe 6.3, VMware added the ability to look at guest OS metrics. One of the things …

Everyone’s got one, everyone needs them, and most people struggle with them. I’m talking about custom machine names, of course. Just like organizations themselves, naming schemes can be, and are about, as varied as possible. Some companies have fairly straightforward names with maybe two elements while others have …

Backup servers, I think we can all agree, are of primary importance. We rely upon them for business continuity as much as we rely upon other systems of primary record like Active Directory or DNS. So why is it that we monitor the latter systems with such fervor and the former not at all? Often times, we don’t know that …