Archive for September, 2017

VMworld 2017 EU Day 1 (part 2)- #HACKATHON (awesome!!) #vexpert #vmwarecode

Tuesday, September 12th, 2017

So there where two things I knew for a few years.
– Everyone always seems to have an awesome time at Hackathons
– I am not a developer, not even a descent scripter, how could I contribute to something like this?

Well VMware{Code}, who organise the VMworld hackathon, don’t care all that much what you can do going in.
The point is to learn and to have fun

A bit difference for me this year was being in the vExpert community. And as you might imagine, there is quite a bit of overlap between vExperts, VMware{code} community and innovative scripters. Well they where all very encouraging. So I decided to just throw myself in there!

Quite a diverse lineup of teams. I have wanted to get into Ansible for a while, so I immediately saw my oppertunity in Team4

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kAjZD5Y8ayz6OT7idrymREc9Y4E3BZhE63mfUVCbuO8/edit#gid=0

 

I ended up taking responsibility for the presentation of our teams results, so I made the powerpoint which summarizes what we tried to achieve:

 

 


Being both a Linux and Ansible noob, I spent most of my evening trying to get the VIC OVA copied onto my Ubuntu VM to test our deployment parameters.

Also, it took half an hour to deploy VIC each time we tried… this we called.. a constraint :p

 

 

However, I have to say that a lot of effort was put into providing us a cool deployment environment. They gave us the option to use the on-prem hardware they had set up in the Hackerspace where we at, OR.. to use VMware on AWS, which was of course very cool.
For practical reasons we ended up going on prem – mostly so it was easier to SSH in.

 

 

I partnered with @kev_johnson (of the @OpenTechCast podcast) to create the OVF deployment part. Kev ended up doing 99% of the work. I contributed mostly by googling some variables and pointing out irrelevant things and distracting him. :p 

While we didn’t really manage to test much of our solution, we did put all the Ansible roles and playbook in GIT. This was our main goal, to be able to contribute something to the community. And we succeeded in this. Its not finished, but its a great start!

https://github.com/pdellaert/automation-for-all

 

 

 

 

The main goal was to learn, and that we all certainly did do. I now have a far better understanding of where all the moving parts go for Ansible, and am happy to see its actually not all that complicated. I also learnt how to use GIT which will be extremely useful going forward.

 

 

The main thing I could meaningfully contribute was my some powerpoint and the accompanying presentation of the teams results. Within 90 seconds!

Unfortunately, our ultimate gambit of bribing the judges with Belgium and Dutch chocolate products, did not succeed :p

 

I want to give a MASSIVE thank you to our teamleader and inspirator:  who really helped us get to grips with all this new stuff, and did a significant bit of preperation on his blog.

VMworld Europe Hackathon: Introducing team Automation for All

VMworld Europe Hackathon: Preparation

I want to thank our team, who really pulled together and took their tasks seriously:

Kev Johnson (@kev_johnson – beer connisseur, hoping to learn loads about Ansible as I know *literally* nothing… Not sure what I can bring to the party other than enthusiasm!)
Ozan Orcunus (@vOrcunus) – system architect with a high interest in devops mindset and infra as code concepts, random powercli scripter and virtualization guy.
Chris Lewis (@thecloudxpert) – vExpert, VCIX6, all things SDDC and vRealise Suite – Ansible n00b – merc that may switch teams before the day 😄
Orhan Biyiklioglu (@biyiklioglu) – ex-sysadm new cloud engineer.
Laurent Borgognon (@lbggn / @BruksL) – beer expert – Ansible n00b but want to learn – random Scripter
Nick Goldman (@nickgold) Interested in all Infrastructure automation. Looking to learn about ansible

 

And finally I want to thank the VMware{code} team and the judges for putting this all together and making this such a fun event!
Jake Robinson, Nikki Roda, Tim Bonneman, William Lam, Alan Renouf, Steve Trefethen and Ricky Trilago and everyone else involved. Great event! Hopefully see you next time!

 

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VMworld 2017 EU Day 1 (part 1) #vexpert

Tuesday, September 12th, 2017

Had a super productive first day at VMworld!
The Partner day is typically a bit quieter than the rest of the week, and more sales-oriented in the breakout-sessions. But I only got 1 session in anyway, as the rest of the day was focused on, imo, more valuable private sessions with various VMware groups.

UX Design Session VMware on AWS

First up was the a VMware User Experience design session based around VMware on AWS.  We only had an hour and that barely touched on all feedback we could give. We ended up going only through the initial first setup wizzard and discussing a lot about how and where it integrates with Amazon AWS structures.  Extremely useful to also get a first impression of VMware on AWS, but I think I will go for the Hands-On Lab here at VMworld, to get a more general overview.

A User Experience design session can be a strange experience if you don’t know what to expect.  Its the session leaders responsibility t mostly listen and observe how people experience the product, strongly from a user-interface perspective.  They will ask you specific questions such as “what is the first thing on this screen your eyes are drawn to?”, “when I click on this button, what is your expectation of what will happen” , “Does this popup meet your expectations?”.  It was a surprising amount of fun.

 


Participation is rewarded with swag! You can expect some unique gifts for getting involved on the day. We don’t do it for the swag, but its of course appreciated 😉

GSS Leadership Session

At Redlogic, through our engagement with our main customer, we have enjoyed a very close working relationship with VMware GSS in Cork. We have weekly meetings to discuss open SR’s, and have even been toured around personally by the Director of GSS in Cork.  So every year at VMworld, its a pleasure to meet up with the GSS team in person and talk about the past year of support, the roadmap for our customer going forward, and any areas things can improve.  While previous years might have spent talking about issues about NSX, we where pleased to talk about all the stuff that has now been fixed and how stable the VMware software stack is overall. Even if you have nothing to complain about, its good to give feedback and to emphasize and celebrate success together.

NSX Product UI Feedback and Preview session

There are not many companies who have claimed to have worked with NSX for over 3 years. So our feedback is valued and this is noticeable. I gave detailed and deep feedback over aspects of the distributed firewall UI and about management of NSX Edge appliances, which we do a lot with.

Also got a preview of upcoming changes and ideas about the NSX UI, which was very cool.

The ability to give direct feedback, to talk one-on-one with product managers about the product and the roadmap, is in my opinion far more valuable that visiting breakout sessions (that you can watch later online anyway).  I take giving feedback seriously and enjoy it, and VMware has an absolutely healthy attitude about feedback.

 

Lego

😉

 

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