VMworld 2018 – FOMO? Never fear!

In just a few days friends, colleagues, teachers, luminaries and thought leaders will be converging on Las Vegas for the biggest and best virtualization conference in the world. If you’re in the same shoes as me, VMworld 2018 just isn’t in the cards. Hearing that Tony Hawk , Run DMC, The Roots and Snoop would be a part had me a bit bummed. However it was when I heard that Malala would be participating in the general sessions, that I turned that attitude around.

It was then that I realized there is still a wealth of ways to experience VMworld, even when you’re 2,638 miles away from Las Vegas, not that I’m counting or anything.

General Sessions

Like I alluded to above, it was seeing that Malala would be participating in the general sessions that helped turn my attitude around. The reason for this is that VMware makes an effort to broadcast the General Sessions live.

If you haven’t been to a major conference, these sessions are the reason why a lot of people refer to conferences as a “show”. It’s time for the heavy hitters, for the big production and for news to drop. The general sessions that I’ve attended tend to follow a pattern:

Day 1 State of the Union. Let’s highlight our successes, broad industry trends and how we are positioned to respond or better yet, led those trends.
Day 2-N  Thought leaders. Talk about growth, and what the future holds. Not everything that you see at a tech conference will become reality. I feel like it’s these days where you see organizations testing the water to see how ideas and roadmaps feel among the various stakeholders.
Last day  Honestly these are my favorite sessions. The show’s almost over, some folks have already left town and honestly the people who are left are likely kind of burnt out. VMworld always saves something cool for those brave and/or hardy folks who are left standing on the last day.

Now unfortunately that final cool session is only for attendees. It’s probably a good reason to start working on your budget justification to attend next year… For the Monday and Tuesday sessions however, you’ll want to set a calendar reminder to tune in at 9:00AM PT for the general sessions live on VMworld.com

vBrownBag Tech Talks

The vBrownBag talks are one of my favorite parts of VMworld. If you’re reading this blog, you already know about the #vBrownBag crew, but if by some chance you don’t know… vBrownBag is a community of passionate people who want to share and facilitate sharing within the IT Infrastructure community.

Getting my feet wet at my first #vBrownBag session

The other cool part about vBrownBag is that they produce Tech talks. These are short community sessions ranging from just a few minutes up to a half hour in length. You can check out my 2017 session on life as a SMB in a big Enterprise world or PowerCLI for examples. (Go easy on me, I was nervous about my other sessions). The whole point of vBrownBag is sharing and the very cool people who produce the Tech Talks do a damn fine job at it. If you want to follow along live, you can check out the action on vbrownbag.com or if you are unable to participate live all sessions are posted to the vBrownBag YouTube channel, usually within an hour or so.

Community members coming together to share with each other. For everyone involved it’s a labor of love and how can you beat that?

VMware {code} Power Sessions

I am super excited about this new offering! And maybe a touch bummed that I’m not going to be participating… But just because I won’t be presenting, doesn’t mean that I won’t be following along. Similar to what the vBrownBag folks are doing, the VMware community team will be hosting expert-led presentations from community members, but with a focus on DevOps and developers. All the action will be live streamed via the {code} facebook page. You can check out the entire line-up by searching for CODE sessions in the content catalog.

VMTN

Since we’re talking about community, let’s not forget about VMTN. The VMTN page is always a hotbed of activity during VMworld. I’m not sure why it’s a secret, but nevertheless it is kind of the secret sauce to staying in the know during the show. If you wanted a place to participate in contests, watch live streams, chime in with all of your community friends, then you might want to head over to the VMTN page.

Bloggers

Holy crap! How can I forget the bloggers! While writing a blog post! Shame!

In my mind the blogosphere (is that still a term?) is the lifeblood of our vCommunity. It’s where passionate people go to talk about the things that matter most. Where we share our successes, our trials and all of the cool things we learn about! What better place to do that than at the VMworld. VMware has a really strong blog presence that’s only gotten stronger over the past year or two. I’m obviously partial to the PowerCLI blog, but next week I’ll be keeping an eye on the official VMworld Blog. If you can’t make the general sessions, this is where the news will drop. I’ll just leave that there…

Beyond the official blog, there are dozens of people blogging about nearly everything that happens at the show. As someone who’s live blogged a general session, I can tell you that the only reason someone would blog from a show is to share with others. Here’s a good place to start if you’re looking for some of the fine folks who’ll be attempting to document everything that happens in Vegas next week. Well, not everything…

Beam me up … me

Sorry (not sorry), horrible dad joke there.

Did you know you can drive a robot at VMworld? Seriously. Ok, not a robot, but a BEAM. Don’t know what a BEAM is? It’s basically FaceTime mounted on a remote control car. You can register to drive one of these super awesome RC devices around the VMTN space. How awesome is that?!?

I’m sure that there are more ways to experience VMworld if you’re not there, but honestly I’m tired just writing this, let alone trying to sample all of the above options. No matter which way you go, there is definitely no fear about being able to make the most of VMworld from afar.

Public Presenting – Lesson’s learned from VMworld 2017

Not everyone can be Sakac, but you can become more comfortable on stage

When I first started this post I was on my way home from VMworld 2017. It was a pretty big week for me, in that these would be my largest public speaking engagements to date. Thanks to the good folks at VMTN and vBrownBag I had the opportunity to present two community sessions. I also joined Mr. Kyle Ruddy to present the last breakout session of the conference for nearly 300 attendees.

In baseball going 2 for 3 is a really good day. In public speaking, that still leaves room for improvement. I learned a ton going through the process of getting ready for and speaking at VMworld. Now that a little time has passed and I can look at the week a bit more rationally, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the lessons learned on public speaking.

Believe

I recently saw a post on twitter that I wish I’d saved. It’s kind of been my battle march for 2017. I don’t know if I can do it justice but to paraphrase it said

“Repeat after me:
You do not have to be an expert to present.
You do not have to be an expert to present.
You do not…“

I have been spending a lot of my “free” time over the past few years learning, developing and evolving my PowerShell/PowerCLI skills. At some point I realized that I was often dropping little nuggets of knowledge among my team, community and even occasionally online.

As one of our local VMUG leaders, I help set agenda’s for our meetings. You can see where this one is going… My first big presentation had some technical challenges that rattled me, but hearing things like “I’m fired up to…”, “Thanks for spreading the PowerCLI love!” and the other kudo’s got me fired up to do a little more. Don’t let me fool you: I am not an expert! I am someone who is passionate and who has been effective with a framework. That and a little belief in yourself is all you need!

For me this is the most important point. If you stop reading after this paragraph, I’m good with that. Believe in yourself! Recognize that you have something to offer and give it your all! This isn’t to say that presenting isn’t scary. It can be, but that can also be overcome and be turned into a really positive experience. If you believe you can, then you will.

Prep

Preparing for the conference should be pretty obvious, but the way the large conferences work is somewhat counter intuitive. Months before the conference, you have to submit a paper proposal. Then you wait to hear if you were accepted or not. And you wait. And wait. I guess during this waiting period you could be prepping, but what happens if you session proposal doesn’t get accepted, then you’ve expended a bunch of your effort in vain… Once that acceptance does come through, the prep can start happening in earnest.

For me I spent a lot of time figuring out the story that I wanted to convey. Once I had the story I could create an outline and really start building the content out. This isn’t anything new, but in this ever connected world it can be tough to take a break and let you creative mind wander. For me, I was jogging a bunch this past spring/summer (gotta get back on that horse!) and every time I came home I’d say hi to the family and run off to jot down notes. After tapping into the muse, I could start crafting the message that I hoped would allow me to connect with the audience and make it personal. The reason I choose to present is to share and hopefully help others. By creating a message that you believe in and that’s personal can go a long way towards having an engaging audience.

Practice

Now just recently I gave a talk which seemed successful, but I waited until the last minute to hammer it out. The week prior I was up until midnight every night getting examples recorded and the presentation dialed in. That lead me to have the material very fresh in my mind, but it certainly cut down on practice time. Which leads me to…

No body likes hearing a ton of “um” and “uh”s when you’re presenting. The way I’ve gotten past this is a by knowing the content and being comfortable with it. For me, that means basically having a script and running through the messaging until I know I’ve got it down cold. I’m an engineer, so being in front of a crowd is not my natural habitat. As such, I have been thrown off my game in the past. The way I get past the person walking out, is by practicing my script well before the day of. It’s like anything, the more comfortable you are with the subject matter, the easier it is to deal with unexpected twists and turns along the way.

Phone a friend

It can be really intimidating standing up in front of people. All eyes are on you. For my big presentation I had a co-presenter, Mr. Kyle Ruddy. And when that hall started filling up, boy was I glad to have him! Having someone up there made a huge difference in my confidence level. If I fumbled or we hit on an area that maybe I didn’t feel as comfortable, I knew that I had a partner willing to step up and help out. I’d like to think that at some point I offered the same value to him.

The other part that’s great about having a buddy presenting with you is that you can make it conversant. Let’s face it, code can be dry, even to those of us who enjoy it. If you have someone you can banter with, it makes the conversation much more real and engaging for your audience.

 

These are just a few lessons I’ve been trying to learn over the past few months. I know that I’m not alone as an Engineer who finds public speaking intimidating, but I know that intimidation can be overcome. Hopefully my words help, but if not here’s a bunch of other guys from our community that know you can do it too.

I Really Need to be Scared More

In college I was always the guy in the group who would volunteer to do more of the “real work” so that I wouldn’t have to speak in front of the class. The fear of speaking in front of people was so pervasive, I would take a lesser grade just to get out of it. Although I’m closing in on my forties and have learned much, that fear has never really left me…

A new pin to add to the collection

Yet when I think back to some of the most amazing events in my life, there has often been an element of fear to them. I’m not talking primal, afraid for my life scared (in most instances), but the fear of the unknown. The one where doubt and uncertainty seeps into your thoughts. The one that’s not quite terror, but something that gets the fight or flight adrenaline going. Like…

• That time when a very good friend was visiting VT and she, my wife and I came up with the (adult beverage enhanced) idea to go sky-diving. When the next day came I thought for sure that we’d all bail. I would have if not for two reasons. A- The ladies went first. B- I got shoved out of the plane. Until the day I die, I will never forget the image as I rolled onto my back and watched that plane fly away from me. There is no doubt in my mind that I’ve never experienced a physical event that was as exhilarating as that one.
• That time I decided to change jobs…  More than once I’ve been told that I’m an enigma. I love comfort, but if I feel that I’m getting complacent, I get an itch to move. That doesn’t mean that these changes don’t come without a lot of sleepless nights and self-doubt. Each and every time has been an enlightening and enriching experience.
• That time I became a Dad… I’m not sure this one requires an explanation. It’s the biggest, toughest, scariest job I’ve ever taken on. The day we left the hospital, I’m pretty sure I drove home at about 15 MPH. My dad said that the train of cars behind us was epic. I didn’t notice because I was staring straight forward, hands white-knuckled at 10&2 on the steering wheel.

Beyond fear, what all of these moments have in common is that they’ve shown me something about myself. They’ve reinforced my self-worth and they’ve invigorated me to do more. In every case I’ve found myself inspired by our humanity and our ability to help each other. Overcoming that fear can force you to acknowledge, sometimes against all that you hold true, that you’re capable of incredible feats.

Which brings us back to the present tense. For some unknown reason (perhaps it was the KBS eh Callahan?) I thought that I could impart something of myself onto my peers by presenting at a major technology conference. For some reason I thought that I would be able to bring some value to individuals by giving a touch of myself. I’m pretty sure that I knew I’d get rejected, which to be 100% honest was part of what convinced me to actually go through with submitting my proposal. Imagine my chagrin when we actually got accepted to speak… to present… to stand up in front of my peers… to expose myself to their critiques. Hundreds of them. HOLY $H!T!

Susan could tell you, I pored myself into preparing for VMworld 2017, but the doubts persisted. Even after I did OK in my first vBrownBag, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I arrived in the hall with plenty of time to spare. There was no other way, as I’m someone who needs to be prepared, but … being there and watching people continue to file in…. Did I mention HOLY $H!T!

And then it was time. When there are hundreds of people watching you, not to mention that big TV camera, well there’s nothing you can do but get on with it. I’ll let you be the judge of my performance, but that’s not what post is about. It’s about the experience. How you learn and grow from it. In the end my experience was amazing. It certainly was fear inducing, but like many things once you get past the first few minutes, the situation normalizes and you have no choice but to try and do your best. Focusing not on the pitfalls, but on the job at hand can be a key element to overcoming that fear.

I think we did pretty well, but even more important, we helped some people. My favorite part of our presentation was answering questions and talking with folks afterwards. Being able to share and connect with other people was pretty humbling. I’ve worked on some decent projects and I’ve had my fair share of success professionally. However this experience was more like skydiving: I can assure you that I have never been so jacked up after a professional experience as I was after our presentation.

So despite the fear and trepidation, it seems that scaring myself has been a pretty solid way to grow as a person, and now as a professional. With all of our natural instincts to run from threatening situations, if you stay and face the situation, the possibility for growth can be mind blowing.

With that, it’s time to sign off. I’ve got another presentation to prepare for…

VM life-cycle with PowerCLI

I’ve heard many authors talk about how through their writing process the story or the characters change. I guess this is one reason titles aren’t decided on until the very end of the writing process. When I submitted my session proposal for “No Money, No Problem!” I had originally planned on writing about using PowerShell/PowerCLI as an automation/orchestration engine. I’ve learned over the years that it “may” not be the best idea to fight the muse. During the writing process for this presentation I followed where the muse led and in the end this presentation ended up being much more about the potential ways that you can automate the life-cycle of a VM. I’m hopeful that if you attended the talk, that it was still useful for you despite the slight pivot. Fifteen minutes is not a lot of time for a technical talk, so this post is an deeper dive into the content from my VMTN presentation. So without further ado….

Day 1

The activities on Day 1 are all about configuring the environment. The example I chose to use in my session was setting up a vDS. You can just as easily apply the same logic to something like setting up iSCSI datastores, clusters or the like. The overall premise is that by leveraging PowerCLI you can speed up the delivery of your environments, while delivering higher quality infrastructure. Let’s take a quick peek at how this is done in the context of delivering the elements necessary to run a Distributed Switch. Striping out extraneous code and comments, what you’re left with is a five liner that will give you a Distributed Switch.

$DC=Get-Datacenter -Name "NoProblem"
New-VDSwitch -Name "vds_iscsi" -Location $DC -LinkDiscoveryProtocol LLDP -LinkDiscoveryProtocolOperation "Both" -Mtu 9000 -MaxPorts 256

New-VDPortgroup -Name "pg_iscsi_vlan5" -VDSwitch $(Get-VDSwitch -Name "vds_iscsi") -VlanId 5 -NumPorts 16

Add-VDSwitchVMHost -VMHost esx-06a.corp.local -VDSwitch vds_iscsi
$pNic=Get-VMHost esx-06a.corp.local|Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter -Physical -Name vmnic1

Get-VDSwitch -Name "vds_iscsi"|Add-VDSwitchPhysicalNetworkAdapter -VMHostPhysicalNic $pNic -Confirm:$false

So we pretty immediately get to the heart of why I’m such a PowerCLI advocate with this example. When we look at a command like “New-VDSwitch” it’s pretty intuitive what’s going on; we are creating a new vDS. It kind of doesn’t make sense to go through the plethora of switches/options as they are highly dependent on the situation. That being said there are a couple of items I’d like to call out in this example.

1. PowerShell allows you to run a command in-line and pass the resulting object directly into a variable. That’s what you see happening here, where the Get-VDSwitch call is wrapped by $(…):

   $(Get-VDSwitch -Name "vds_iscsi")

2. The power of the PipeLine. By using this powerful tool you can string multiple commands together to create complex actions in a very small amount of real estate.

Day 2

New VM’s 1

It’s my belief that if folks do nothing else but automate the provisioning of VM’s, then then can deliver immense value to their organizations and do it quite quickly. In the code below we create an OSCustomizationSpec, leverage that within a temporary spec with static IP addressing, which is then leveraged in the New-VM example. This is a pretty basic example, but you take it as far as you’d like. In a previous role this simple VM deployment evolved and became the 1700 line basis for our automated deployments.

$DomainCred=Get-Credential -Message "Enter Domain Admin credentials" -UserName "corp.local\Administrator"
New-OSCustomizationSpec -name Win2k12 -Domain "corp.local" -DomainCredentials $DomainCred -Description "Windows 2012 App Server" -FullName "PatG" -OrgName "VMware" -ChangeSid
Get-OSCustomizationSpec "Win2k12" |New-OSCustomizationSpec -Name "Win2k12_temp" -Type NonPersistent
for ($i = 1; $i -le 4; $i++){
  Get-OSCustomizationNicMapping-OSCustomizationSpec "Win2k12_temp"|Set-OSCustomizationNicMapping-IpMode UseStaticIP -IpAddress "192.168.10.10$i"-SubnetMask "255.255.255.0"-DefaultGateway "192.168.10.1"-Dns "192.168.10.10"
  New-VM-Name "WinApplication0$i"-Template "base-w12-01"-OSCustomizationSpec "Win2k12_temp"-ResourcePool $(Get-Cluster"MyCluster")
}

Walking through this example line by line

Line 1: We enter domain credentials and store them in a PSCredential object for use later on.

Line 2: Using the New-OSCustomizationSpec we create a base OS Customization spec, which is used in …

Line 3: We create a temporary OS Spec which we’ll leverage in the customization and deployment of our VM’s. All of this however is just laying the ground work for

Line 5: Within the loop we take the previously created temporary OS Spec and we customize it for use with the …

Line 6: We get to the meat of the matter where we are deploying a VM using the new-vm cmdlet and our newly created and updated temp OS spec to configure Windows for us.

New VMs – Linux from json

While the previous example will simplify matters, it’s not exactly the prettiest code, not to mention the fact that values are hard coded. If you want to start taking your automation to the next level you have to be able to accept inputs in order for the code to be more portable. Thanks to PowerShell’s ability to interpret json (as well as xml, and host of other formats) we can simply read in the desired configuration, and somewhat dynamically create the VM. If you want to include splatting you can go even further with your abstractions, but that’s a post for another day.

$InputFile = “c:\temp\linux_servers.json”
$Servers = $(Get-Content $InputFile -Raw| ConvertFrom-Json).Servers

foreach ($Server in $Servers)
{
    new-vm -name $Server.Name -ResourcePool $Server.Cluster -NumCpu $Server.CPU -MemoryGB $Server.Mem
}

The other Day 2 activity I chose to highlight is reporting. After all, how will you know about the performance and capacity of the environment, if you aren’t taking it’s pulse? Thanks to the kind folks at VMware, statistics can be exposed for use via the get-stat cmdlet which is the star of this example.

$objServers = Get-Cluster Demo | Get-VM
foreach ($server in $objServers) {
    if ($server.guest.osfullname -ne $NULL){
        if ($server.guest.osfullname.contains("Windows")){
            $stats = get-stat -Entity $server -Stat "cpu.usage.average","mem.usage.average" -Start $start -Finish $finish

            $ServerInfo = "" | Select-Object vName, OS, Mem, AvgMem, MaxMem, CPU, AvgCPU, MaxCPU, pDisk, Host
            $ServerInfo.vName  = $server.name
            $ServerInfo.OS     = $server.guest.osfullname
            $ServerInfo.Host   = $server.vmhost.name
            $ServerInfo.Mem    = $server.memoryGB
            $ServerInfo.AvgMem = $("{0:N2}" -f ($stats | Where-Object {$_.MetricId -eq "mem.usage.average"} | Measure-Object -Property Value -Average).Average)
            $ServerInfo.MaxMem = $("{0:N2}" -f ($stats | Where-Object {$_.MetricId -eq "mem.usage.average"} | Measure-Object -Property Value -Maximum).Maximum)
            $ServerInfo.CPU    = $server.numcpu
            $ServerInfo.AvgCPU = $("{0:N2}" -f ($stats | Where-Object {$_.MetricId -eq "cpu.usage.average"} | Measure-Object -Property Value -Average).Average)
            $ServerInfo.MaxCPU = $("{0:N2}" -f ($stats | Where-Object {$_.MetricId -eq "cpu.usage.average"} | Measure-Object -Property Value -Maximum).Maximum)
            $ServerInfo.pDisk  = [Math]::Round($server.ProvisionedSpaceGB,2)

            $mycol += $ServerInfo
        }
    }
}

$myCol | Sort-Object vName | Export-Csv "VM_report.csv" -NoTypeInformation

In the example above we simply iterate through the cluster, and obtain statistics on our Windows VM’s via the aforementioned get-stat cmdlet. Next we store all of the information we care about in the $ServerInfo hashtable. This hashtable is ultimately what’s used for output at the end of the code snip.

I do want to take a moment to breakdown what’s happening in the calculations functions, as it can be a little off-putting if you don’t know what’s happening there. So let’s take the following line and break it down piece by piece.

$("{0:N2}" -f ($stats | Where-Object {$_.MetricId -eq "mem.usage.average"} | Measure-Object -Property Value -Average).Average)

$(…) as we should know by now anything that leads with a $ sign is a variable. PowerShell allows us to cast results from commands or other objects into a variable simply by enclosing in parenthesis with a leading $.
“{0:N2}” Mathematical operator. In this case we’re formatting the value that is a result of the command that follows “-f”. In this specific instance I choose to keep two digits to the right of the decimal place. This is indicated by N2.

The command yielding our number just shows the amount of fun you can get into with pipelines. Starting just to the right of the “-f” option, we take our $stats object and pare it down using the Where-Object cmdlet. These values get further parsed out by piping into Measure-Object, which in this particular case is simply calculating out the average of the desired values in the object.

After all that is said and done, we can use the ever handy Export-Csv to come up with a pretty CSV for the powers that be, which shows just how efficient your environment is humming along!

D-day

Just like this blog post, and the presentation it supports, all good things must come to an end. And so it is with infrastructure as well. In our final example, we use the metrics from the all-powerful and omniscient vRealize Operations Manager. It should probably come as no surprise to you that the metrics which are stored in the all-knowing vROps server can be exposed to you via PowerCLI. If you’ve used or tested vROps I’m guessing that one of the first thing you checked out was the “Oversized VMs” report. We’ll use one of the statistics that make up this report in this last code snip:

$cred=Get-Credential
Connect-OMServer -Server "Demo" -Credential $cred -AuthSource "ADdomain"

$when = $(get-date).AddDays(-20)
$vkey = "Summary|Oversized"
$threshold = ".75"

foreach ($vm in $(get-vm|Select-Object -First 33)){
    $vrstat=$vm|Get-OMResource
    $avg = $vrstat|Get-OMStat -Key $vkey -from $when|Select-Object -ExpandProperty Value|Measure-Object -Average

    write-host $vm.name, $avg.average
    if($avg.Average -gt $threshold){
        write-host $vm.name, $avg.average
        if($vm.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"){
            stop-vm -vm $vm -Confirm:$true -WhatIf:$true
        }
    Start-Sleep 3
    Remove-VM -vm $vm -DeletePermanently -RunAsync -Confirm:$true -WhatIf:$true
    }
}

Starting to work with the vROps commandlets (contained within the VMware.VimAutomation.vROps module) has a little bit of a learning curve associated with it, so we’ll break down some of the key elements on a line by line basis again.

Line 2: vROps is a separate entity from vCenter so we need to use the Connect-OMServer cmdlet to connect. One of the things that is pretty poorly documented, which may trip you up, is the authentication model in use with this cmdlet. If you are using domain credentials you want to use your short-name and the display name that you setup in vROps as the domain authentication source.

line 9: In this case I chose to pass in a VM object into the Get-OMResource, but you can just as easily use the -Name parameter. Get-OMResource simply returns the vROPs object that we’ll use with…

Line 10: Get-OMStat. The Get-OMStat cmdlet is where you actually start returning metrics out of vROps. In this case I’m using the “Summary|Oversized” statistics key. There are literally thousands of key’s that you can leverage. I’d suggest perusing Mr. Kyle Ruddy’s post on this subject here. For the purposes of this very simple example I figured I’d use an average of the data returned over time to see if this machine is oversized and therefore a candidate for removal. Obviously in an real situation you’d want a lot more logic around an action like this.

 $vrstat|Get-OMStat -Key $vkey -from $when|Select-Object -ExpandProperty Value|Measure-Object -Average 

Breaking down the command line by line. We call the

$vrstat

object and pipeline it into Get-OMstat where we narrow down the results by key using the previously defined $vkey variable as well as date duration of 20 days defined in the $when variable. Finally I’m just interested in the actual values stored within the $vrstat object so we pipeline through the

Select-Object -ExpandProperty Value

cmdlet to pull only the data we want. Lastly we use the

Measure-Object

cmdlet to get an average for use in our simple example.

Line13: A simple If statement checks if we’ve crossed our pre-defined threshold. If we have, we move on to our D-day operations. Otherwise the script moves on to the next VM.

Line 16: You can’t delete a VM that’s powered on. Since we are deleting this VM anyway, there’s no need to gracerfully shut down, so we just power it off.

Line 19: So sorry to see you go VM.

Remove-VM

does exactly what it sounds like. If we omit the

-DeletePermanently

parameter we’ll simply remove the VM from inventory. In this case, we want it removed from disk as well, so the parameter is included. Lastly we don’t want to wait for the Remove operation before moving on to our next victim, so the

-RunAsync

parameter tells our script not to wait for a return before moving on.

NOTE: I don’t know if anyone will use this code or not (I surely hope it helps someone), however just in case you do, I’ve set -Confirm and -WhatIf to $true so that you don’t have any OOPS moments. Once you’re comfortable with what’s happing and how it’ll affect your environment, you can set these fit your needs.

As I said at the outset, I hope you found this talk and post useful. I plan on doing a couple of deeper dives into some of the above topics, so if you’re still reading I appreciate your follows.

Lastly, I’d like to offer up a huge thanks to the good folks at VMTN and vBrownBag for the opportunities they offer people like me and you. If you find this interesting or feel that you have a voice to contribute, please do! A vibrant community depends on engaged people like you.

Thanks for reading, see you soon.

SD

T-minus…

In 10 days I board a jet-plane for VMworld (HOLY CRAP!) which means the excitement is starting to ramp up. There are meetings, demos, events and of course parties to plan for, but how you approach a major conference is something that is very particular to the individual and that’s what I’d like to spend a few minutes discussing today. There are about as many ways to approach a major conference as there are attendees. Really? No,  but let’s just pretend so that I can share a few lessons learned from my conference experiences.

The Lab Guy

My first major conference I spent the majority of my time sitting in the lab soaking up as much hands on experience as I could. I would go hit the expo floor, grab a snack and an adult beverage, hide said adult beverage and hit the lab for hours. Not to say it wasn’t valuable but it damaged my spirit a little when late in the conference I learned that all of the labs would be available online after the conference ended… Oof.

After hearing this bit of spirit breaking news I learned that there is a really valuable reason to be in the labs: the guided sessions. Any time you can sit down with an expert, pick their brains, while gaining hand’s on experience, well… that’s just a win right there.

The pros to this are pretty obvious, you get to spend dedicated time learning, which is never a bad thing, but the fact that HOL will have the labs available on-demand after VMworld Europe diminishes the value somewhat.

The Expo/Party Guy

These strange beasts are very closely related to the Party People. Tech conferences are fun. There is a lot of beer and a lot of free stuff. But there’s always the person who devotes themselves strictly to these endeavors. A lot of really great information can be gleaned off the floor, but at a price… the dreaded badge scanners! If you’re ok with that, then you have a really great opportunity to learn about emerging tech.

Now the expo floor is great, and I have my fair share of headaches/swag to show for it, however there are some folks who make this the primary objective of their conference. The expo floor should be one tool in your conference bat-belt, but if it’s your bat-mobile… maybe it’s being overdone a little bit.

Breakdancers

Yeah ok, that sub-title is horrible, but I couldn’t think of a fun (and appropriate) way to label the folks who are all breakouts, all the time. This one is usually me. Attending conferences isn’t cheap, even if it isn’t coming directly out of your pocket. I usually want to return some value to my sponsor and that historically has taken the form of trying to take away as much directly applicable knowledge as possible. Next to the labs, this might be the most effective way to soak up as much technological knowledge as possible. In my mind, Breakouts are the meat and potatoes of a conference, so it’s hard for me to find a downside here. But like all things, including meat and potatoes, take it in moderation.

Contributors

“Active Participators” may be another way to frame this and it’s a new one for me. At Dell/EMC world 2017, I made it my mission to blog as much as possible. Going into VMworld 2017 I’m really making it my mission to get involved as much as I can. There are so many events that you can get involved with, I’d urge you to get out there and broaden your horizons a bit. On top of the parties located on the gatherings page, you can find opportunities to play games, get into the hackathon, blog in the village and a whole host of other activities.

Whatever your approach, I hope you find the right balance of activities to make your conference amazing. See you in Sin City!

PS: If you need more things to do, come check out my sessions.

The Phoenix Project

From the moment that I arrived in Vegas for VMworld 2016 I started hearing about this book The Phoenix Project. At first I thought that my ears were playing tricks on me when I heard that it was a DevOps novel. This weird reality sunk in when during the opening day keynote address John Spiegel,  IT manager at Columbia Sportswear spoke about the virtues of this book. (segment begins right around 51min)

Given all the chatter around this book, I ordered it from my seat before Mr. Spiegel had even left the stage. The primary message from Mr. Spiegel and the session in general was “treat IT as a factory, focusing on efficiency’s, optimizations”. This is obviously a very important message, but I’d argue that anyone who works in IT and hasn’t recognized, learned, embodied this message, or at a minimum isn’t working towards it…  well… there’s probably other fundamental messages that should be more relevant to them.

There is an underlying theme to the presentation, Mr. Spiegel’s talk and in this book that resonated very strongly with me and that is is to take an Outside-In approach to IT. Instead of focusing on a technology or a framework as many in IT are prone to do, we need to look at the problems (and successes) that people throughout the Organization experience. Take that newfound knowledge to figure out how we can use technology to positively affect their experiences and therefore positively drive the goals of the business. Once articulated it’s a pretty simple concept to internalize: if you don’t know the business, its positives and its problems then how can you possibly be most effective in helping the Organization move forward?

One particular individual in The Phoenix Project recognizes this reality in a rather dramatic fashion and goes from the stereotypical vision of “IT as the department of ‘no'” to one who actively seeks engagement. He takes the empathetic approach of trying to understand both the pains and successes of his business and how he can use his technological skills to affect change for the positive. There is a realization that by attempting to apply strict dogmatic InfoSec principles he just may slow things down. Once his mindset shifts to an Outside-In approach, he’s able to get a far greater level of cooperation, able to implement more of the principles he cherishes, all the while moving the business and his personal/career objectives forward at a faster pace!

The inside out approach is just one piece of this fantastic book. The novel format is one that I haven’t seen in IT improvement books before, and it certainly makes for an engaging read. Don’t mistake this book for a deep-dive into any frameworks or technologies. Rather it creatively addresses many of the common challenges which need addressing in order for you to develop a high performing IT organization. If you’re looking for a guide on how to begin implementing a DevOps framework and culture in your organization, then disregard the sub-title as this probably isn’t the best book for you.

If you’ve ever been bogged down in the quagmire of firefighting, been unable to break the cycle of finger pointing, struggled to come up with fresh approaches to  the struggles of working in a large IT org or even if you’re just someone who works with IT, then this book should be a must read for you.

PS: If you’ve found this interesting, perhaps you’d like to check out my thoughts on Implementing ITIL written by the same authors.

VMworld 2016

 

VMworld 2016 was only my second major industry conference. Just me and 24,000 of my closest friends learning in Vegas. I like to pretend that I’m a specialist, but the reality is that I’m a generalist. So for me one of the best things about a class or a conference is the ability to immerse oneself in a technology and to really look at it from different perspectives than you normally might on a day to day.

One of the more underrated avenues to learn about what’s happening in the industry is the Expo floor. Sure it’s a great way to pick up swag, I mean they don’t have laundry sized bags by the door for nothing, but there’s a lot of knowledge to be gleaned out there. Many of the exhibitors are professionals, but if you’re looking for more than just a free t-shirt you can find SME’s and architects to help you figure out how to solve the problems that may be impacting your business. Here are a couple of the vendors that I found intriguing:

 

• Thycotic, makers SecretServer have a number of authentication tools to simplify management of credentials
• Embotics, have a really compelling orchestration and automation tool that is positioned to be a lower cost, quicker to implement alternative to vRealize Automation.
• There were more backup and cloud replication startups than you could shake a stick at, but the folks at CloudEndure had a really nice “any to any” solution that I hope makes it through the inevitable consolidation/shakeup that’s bound to happen in this space over the couple years.
• The other big trend on the floor was flash. It’s obvious spinning disk is dead, but to me many of the flash based systems seem to be the same. I’ve been working with EMC’s XtremeIO for a number of years now and find it to be an amazing (if expensive) solution for folks who don’t want to spend their entire existence managing storage. That being said, I’m really hopeful that I get to put my hands on some Pure storage one of these days soon.

Ostensibly, this is a technical conference and (for me) the primary purpose for attending is to learn via the breakout sessions. Here’s what I took away from all of the sessions: DevOps, DevOps, Cloud, IoT, DevOps, DevOps.

Did I mention DevOps?

As vSphere approaches saturation point VMware is obviously turning their attention more and more towards the SDDC. Anyone who’s been paying attention the last few years has seen that vSAN and NSX have become arguably the primary focus of VMware development and marketing efforts. When you combine that with vRealize Operations & vRealize Automation and you had a full on DevOps party. Now I agree, getting things done in less time is awesome, as is less operational churn, but a quick spin through the highlighted sessions shows just how VMware is going all in on DevOps. The focus on many of the tool-sets and solutions are geared towards large enterprise. Now there aren’t a ton of large enterprises in Vermont, so it would be nice to see VMware come out with some solutions that required less investments (time, human and budgetary) to get up and running.

That being said, there were a number of really great sessions that I attended. Chris Wahl of http://wahlnetwork.com/ had a really great session around automating and enforcing cluster configurations using PowerCLI.  Multiple really great sessions around vRO that again makes me wish that VMware would come out with a “lite” version of these operational tools.

Now I don’t think it’s worth much time to go into VMware’s cloud strategies. Needless to say they are a little bit slow on this one. It’s completely reasonable as I’m sure there’s some fear inside Palo Alto that the cloud will kill the golden goose. However this is one of those get on board or move aside moments. In fact the only thing that VMware has done in the cloud space that has me really excited is the AWS announcement that came out only a month after VMware announced their Intel partnership…. Well, let’s just say that there isn’t much to say about VMware’s cloud stategy.

Lastly, the only thing I learned which I wish someone had taught me before heading to Vegas is to take it easy. There are no shortage of opportunity’s for fun and networking, but you don’t want to go too fast or you’ll burn out before the end of the week. By the time the Wednesday night appreciation party came around, all I wanted was a burger, fries and to watch a movie in my hotel room.

All in all VMworld 2016 was an amazing experience. So much knowledge to be gained, so many interesting things to see and so many people to meet.

I hope to see you all at VMworld 2017!