VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery – Walkthrough and Integration with the SDDC Import/Export Fling

Disaster Recovery is a topic that comes up in most of my interactions with customers. In my 3+ years in the VMware Cloud team, my general observations are: Some customers’ DR strategy is limited to copying data to offsite tapes… but most large enterprise customers I talk to have a secondary or tertiary site they […]

New Fling: Easy Deploy for NSX Load Balancing a.k.a EasyAvi

When customers start using cloud infrastructure, there are five key networking components they want to replicate within their virtual cloud environment: Router Switch Firewall VPN Load-Balancer Out-of-the-box, VMware Cloud on AWS gives you the first four components but the Load-Balancing was somehow lacking. Yes, we could use virtual appliances from vendors like F5. Yes, we […]

My Monthly Roundup – February 2021

Second edition of my monthly roundup! Customer Engagements With my role changing recently, I am less involved directly with UK customers but I tend to work with any customers worldwide around discussions on automation or advanced networking and security. I also focus on being a bridge between our customers and our product teams, to ensure […]

Automated Consumption of the VMware Marketplace

Since I last blogged about the VMware Cloud Marketplace, a lot of has happened with this service: they’ve merged it with the VSX (VMware Solution Exchange) and renamed it to VMware Marketplace (see the announcement). I hadn’t had many reasons and opportunities to use it but I’ve been thinking about the whole VM provisioning recently […]

New Fling: SDDC Import/Export for VMware Cloud on AWS

Today (8th February 2021), I’m delighted to announce the release of our new Fling : SDDC Import/Export for VMware Cloud on AWS. A common request from VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS customers and partners is the ability to save the configuration of a VMC environment (a Software-Defined Data Center – SDDC) and restoring it to […]

PyVMC Update: Release 1.2

The Python Client for VMware Cloud on AWS has had a few minor upgrades over the past few months. It’s been great to hear that more and more customers that are using it for automation, operation and migrations. The code is also being used for side projects such VMware Hands on Labs or for other […]

NSX-T L2VPN with APIs and Python

I always like a coding challenge so when my colleague Itonaga-san asked on an internal Slack channel how to create a NSX L2VPN using the APIs, that gave me an opportunity to help a colleague and get coding! My first question though was – why? The response was that a customer in Japan was trying […]

Running Python and Terraform against a simulated vCenter environment with vcsim

As if I needed more ideas for my blog, William Lam challenged me to test a nice little tool he had just blogged about. The blog was about leveraging a cool tool – vcsim – that records an existing vCenter inventory, restores a fake version of it and lets you interact with this simulated vCenter […]

Automation with VMware Cloud on AWS and vRealize Automation ABX

Updated (14th August 2020): for more information on this project, read Vincent’s blog post here One of the most fascinating aspects of working for a company like VMware is the opportunity to work directly with the product teams who design and build the solutions I get to play with. But at the rate the company […]

Fling Update: PyVMC 1.1 release (and a walkthrough through some Python code)

Since I released PyVMC (a Python-based client to manage VMware Cloud on AWS co-created with Matt Dreyer) on my blog and as a VMware Fling, I’ve seen a fair bit of interest from engineers that need to automate the configuration of their VMC SDDC or that need to configure a large amount of security rules. […]