How to monitor Air Quality with a Raspberry Pi

I recently had the opportunity to work on a project with British Heart Foundation to reduce heart and lungs diseases through technology. The team I worked with focused on air quality. It has no obvious link with my day job at VMware but it has been a great experience so far and it has finally […]

Introducing PyVMC: a Python-based tool for VMware Cloud on AWS

Last updated – 19th June 2020 This tool has now been promoted to a Fling and we are now up to version 1.1 with DFW support. More and more of our customers are automating as many common tasks as possible. There are many ways to script, codify or automate tasks with VMware Cloud on AWS […]

HashiCorp Terraform for vSphere – update for TF 0.12 and later

HashiCorp Terraform 0.12 was released back in May 2019 but most of my work with TF was using v0.11 or earlier. Some viewers of my previous post let me know they had some issues with the previous template configuration I had provided so here is an updated and validated version with 0.12. This post will […]

Introducing HashiCorp Terraform Provider for NSX-T Policy Manager and VMware Cloud on AWS

Last update on 12th January 2021: Added a comment about a new option “nsxt_policy_predefined_gateway_policy” that removes the requirement to run “terraform import”. Previous update on 2nd September 2020: Terraform NSX-T Policy provider is automatically downloaded when running “terraform init” (no need to compile it – read further below for more details). This blog post will […]

Introducing the HashiCorp Terraform Provider for VMware Cloud on AWS

Last updated on 2nd September 2020: Terraform VMC provider is automatically downloaded when running “terraform init” (no need to compile it – read further below for more details). Here is a feature I had been hoping to see for for a long time – a Terraform provider to spin up VMware Cloud on AWS resources. […]

Python Tips – Parsing, Dictionaries and APIs

This post will go through various Python tips on topics such as: Parsing Python strings Extracting entries from Python dictionaries and list Making API requests from Python In a previous post, I wrote a AWS Lambda function in Python that synchronized vSphere tags with NSX Security tags. The main coding challenges were from extracting some […]

AWS CLI – back to basics

I have been setting up Terraform with S3 as back-end and one of the blog posts I was consulting suggested using AWS CLI which I hadn’t been using for a couple of years. So… time to go back to basics! What is the AWS CLI ? The AWS Command Line Interface is “a unified tool […]

Synchronizing NSX security tags with vSphere tags using AWS Lambda

This post will walk-through how to synchronize VMware vSphere Tags with NSX security tags via vRealize Log Insight Cloud and AWS Lambda Python scripts. Thanks to William Lam, Gilles Chekroun and Guillaume Vibert for their help with this project. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career is to listen to customers. It’s too […]

How to monitor and track Twitter APIs with Python and AWS DynamoDB – Summer Experiment #1

This blog will walk through how to capture Tweets matching a certain hashtag and export them to an AWS DynamoDB via the Twitter APIs. This is the first of several silly and mostly pointless experiments I will post this summer. Next posts will look at using AWS IoT, AWS Lambda and VMware Cloud on AWS […]

Infrastructure-As-Code with HashiCorp Terraform, VMware and VMware Cloud on AWS

This blog post will walk through what HashiCorp Terraform is and how to set up Terraform with VMware, including a few examples with VMware Cloud on AWS. Terraform is another tool offered by HashiCorp (I covered Packer in a previous post). Packer provided the ability to create and manage virtual machines from a template written […]