Bedtime story – A tale of two vRA admins

My six-year-old asked me to tell him a bedtime story and it went something like this.

Jimmy and Tommy are both vRA admins.  Jimmy works for a large financial company and Tommy works for a large company that makes really cool stuff.  Both Jimmy and Tommy made great decisions to use vRA to automate their private clouds.  Jimmy decided his organization was going to build all their own integrations.  Tommy  decided to use the SovLabs plugin for all his organizations needs.

Four weeks after Tommy’s vRA deployment his company was using vRA to deploy 75% of their virtual deployments. Meanwhile after four weeks Jimmy is just getting started designing the first of many needed integrations.  Fast forward a year and Tommy’s organization is now deploying 100% of their workloads.  They have reduced management overhead by 45%, and are able to deploy new server requests in under an hour.

A year later Jimmy’s company is still working out bugs with their custom code.  Their administrative overhead is up 55% and it still takes over two-weeks for new server requests to be fulfilled.  Jimmy is working 80+ hours a week and perpetually stressed.  Tommy on the other hand is working 30 hours a week, but don’t tell his boss.  He is enjoying his job and has next to no stress.

I then ask my six-year-old who he would rather be Jimmy or Tommy?  He responded neither daddy I would rather be you.  I asked him why he said he wanted to be me.  He responded, because daddy you helped Tommy only have to work 30 hours a week.

My vRA Journey Continues

Many of you may have already heard after 6 years at VMware I decided to spread my wings and go back to the world from which I came.  I joined VMware when they acquired DynamicOps a little over 6 years ago, and after 6 great years at VMware I decided to move on to something new, but not so new.

If it doesn’t show from my blog I am very passionate about automation.   I’m even more passionate about helping organizations overcome all the challenges they face during their journey towards automation.  Having been working with vRA for over 10 years I’ve learned a lot.  I’ve learned the countless ways different organizations go about achieving the same end result.  I’ve learned the challenges with automation in the datacenter.  I’ve learned I could probably write endlessly about what I have learned Winking smile

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New author and guest authors on dailyhypervisor

I’m happy to inform everyone that dailyhypervisor has a new author that will be bringing you some great cloud management content.  Chris Lennon a very talented individual on the VMware National Software Defined Enterprise Solution Engineering Team.  Chris has expert knowledge in vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations,  vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Configuration manager, and more.   You can check out Chris’s bio here.

Dailyhypervisor is also getting some new guest bloggers as well.  I would like to also welcome Gary Coburn and Paul Gifford as guest bloggers who will also be posting articles related to cloud automation and the software defined datacenter.  Look for some great new content to from these great new contributors.

VMware NSX 6.1 & vCAC 6.1 – Connecting NSX to vCAC

Now that we have installed and configured NSX I think it’s time we connected it to vCAC.  In version 6.1 there are some changes to the integration with NSX and vCAC.  When I say changes I should say there are some great new changes.  The integration now utilizes a vCO Plug-in that handles all the interactions between NSX and vCAC.

Benefits of vCO plug-in for NSX to vCAC integration

The benefits of the vCO plug-in are huge.  These workflows that now exist in vCO are there for you to use in your own customization giving you the ability to interact with NSX in a custom way without having to code against it’s api.  Personally I await the day for all integrations to be this way.

As most of you know the vCAC appliance has vCO built in and the built in vCO server already has the NSX plug-in installed for.  If you want to use an external vCO you will have to deploy the plug-in to that appliance before trying to connect vCAC to NSX.

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