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 […]

Manage Your Entire VMware Infrastructure As Code with HashiCorp Terraform

The session I co-presented with Grant Orchard from HashiCorp is now online and can be found here: In the session, we walk through, with plenty of live demos, how to : Deploy AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS, NSX-T and vSphere infrastructure from code using Terraform (read more on Terraform for VMC, Terraform on NSX-T and […]

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 […]

AWS Transit VPC (Part 2) – with Palo Alto Networks and VMware Cloud on AWS

This technical post will walk through how to set up a Transit VPC with Palo Alto Networks firewalls and how to connect it to VMware Cloud on AWS. The instructions below will also be applicable to a standard AWS VPC. You can also use the commands further below to set up a route-based VPN from […]

VMware Cloud Marketplace, Bitnami and VMware Cloud on AWS

This post will walk through the VMware Cloud Marketplace, Bitnami and VMware Cloud on AWS. One of the most underrated aspects of the success of AWS EC2 is the ease at which customers can deploy 3rd party software onto their platform via the AWS Marketplace. Based on the latest data I’ve come across, the AWS […]

AWS Client VPN Tutorial

This post will provide a tutorial of how to set up AWS Client VPN. AWS Client VPN is a fairly recent AWS service and something I had been meaning to try out for a while. Several customers and colleagues recently asked me about whether it could be used with VMware Cloud on AWS so I […]

VMware Cloud on AWS: NSX Networking and Security book launch, some thanks and thoughts on the book writing process.

Many thanks to Gilles Chekroun and Humair Ahmed for co-writing the VMware Cloud on AWS Networking and Security book with me. Download the eBook here It’s taken us most of 2019 to put it all together and we hope you find it useful. A few thanks to give: Thanks to Tom Gillis for writing the […]

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 […]

Leverage vCenter Converter to migrate to VMware Cloud on AWS

This blog post will walk through leveraging vCenter converter with VMware Cloud on AWS. I’ve had multiple customers asking questions such as: How do I migrate my virtual machines to VMware Cloud on AWS when I don’t have access to vCenter? There are cases where customers have outsourced their infrastructure to a 3rd party and […]