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 …

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 …

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 …

Between speaking with customers, architecting and deploying solutions, and helping others out with their issues on the VMware Communities forums, I encounter a lot of problems and get a lot of info on how customers do business with their CMPs. One of the requests that keeps coming up over and over again is how to deal …

Hi, all, short blog post today to inform you of some new community content. Logging is a pretty important thing these days (well, almost all days), and being able to implement that into your CMP is equally as important. VMware's Log Insight solution is a fantastic platform for aggregating, analyzing, and searching for …

Logging is an extremely important and, in some cases, essential part of a successful data center. That’s why you use a tool like Log Insight to aggregate, query, and alert on them. There are a variety of reasons why having your systems report their logs are crucial. They could be things like compliance: you are bound …

I wrote last about attending VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans and you can view that here. As I was deep in various sessions or talking with peers and Veeam folks, several things stuck out in my mind as current gaps or “nice-to-haves” when it comes to Veeam. So after putting pen to paper, I identified four things I thought …