comdivision: blog

It's the time of year where we look back and see what we have achieved. But for us in comdivision it is also the time of year where we think a lot about those who are not so lucky

I came across to troubleshoot NSX-T connectivity issues between host transport nodes. My first idea was to check if the NSX-T kernel ports are able to “reach” each other, so I decided to start with a simple ping test.

I decided to write an article, because we were discussing a bit on Twitter, about my first steps with vRO 8.0. To get everyone on the same page, I did a lot with vRO in the past years and I haven’t read the release notes or the manual. I hope, it will be pretty easy to setup and use it. We will see. Furthermore, this time, I explicitly outline, that this article represents only my personal opinion, and is not related to opinions from comdivision, VMware, or anybody, person or company, else.

As we started the extensive journey to grow our team we got one question asked from @vhojan from ITQ, which is why self-employed? Let me explain in this post my personal opinion on why we primarily for now look into this specific group of people. And also let‘s be clear, the same as we said we look for people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland nothing is carved in stone, if you think you are a perfect match, please contact us and we will see what‘s possible.

As you might now comdivision was the 1st in Germany and 2nd in EMEA to gain the VMware Cloud on AWS master services competency (see also: https://blog.comdivision.com/blog/2019/08/5-mscs-comdivision-did-it-again). One of our regular tasks is to work with customers in EMEA and North America to evaluate how well the VMware Cloud on AWS offering is a fit for them. Which is why our consultants and architects developed an analytics solution to help customers with a self-paced online assessment.

Heading out to VMworld 2019 US, for me that will be my 17th (counting EMEA and US). Whilst I am honestly not the biggest fan of moving back to San Francisco (not because I don’t like the city, but from a cost and venue/event location perspective) I must say it’s one of the highlights in my yearly schedule.

This time, I am writing about data objects in vRO, because I got asked how to easily create those and add dynamic values into the objects, like JSON, XML, and, my latest use case, dynamic powerCLI scripts.

This Monday morning we got an early call from our VMware partner manager Sabine Maier: "Congratulations… comdivision did it again…", what happened? As you know comdivision is always on the early adopters circle for new VMware technologies, it's not necessarily always that public as we evaluate the market, feature set, but also provide a lot of feedback towards VMware. Which is why sometimes we might not be seen for what we do on a specific product range. VMware Cloud on AWS is a bit different, as we were early in the game and also have already presented at events like the AWS transformation day in Munich earlier this year with lot's of great feedback from the AWS community.

When I was first introduced to the VMware Cloud on AWS (or short VMC) model about 6 months before the launch my first reaction was: „Is this going to be market relevant?“, then I thought „who is the winner? VMware or Amazon?“ and then „Are our more conservative european users going to adopt this?“. And I will come back to some of these points later in this post. Many of you may know my clear position on all the new cloud-native parts: „It‘s nice, but especially in EMEA we have more legacy apps than cloud native. When I even drill deeper into medium or larger enterprises or public customers it‘s getting worse as we even have lot‘s of applications no longer supported, or sometimes vendors don‘t exist anymore.“. And then there is my favorite, which people who said this don‘t admit this anymore: „Everything is moving into the cloud in X years.“.

Over the past few weeks I had to update quite a few instances of vRealize Orchestrator to version 7.6, where I experienced that upgraded instances do not show any workflow logs, or values anymore. My first thought was that the workflow was no longer executed, but actually it proofed to be a display problem in the vRealize Orchestrator Client. While talking to a few friends working near the product I got some guidance on how to potentially solve the issue...

This article focuses on the basics of automating NSX via the API and vRealize Orchestrator. Those two are a very powerful combination, automating NSX for certain use cases and workloads. Of course, you could use the provided workflows by the NSX plugin, but what if you would like to implement a use case not covered by the provided workflows. Furthermore, the built-in workflows are using the scripting objects instead of the native REST API. Thus, intended me to write this article.

During VMworld 2018 I had the opportunity to get invited by Amy Lewis team to record an episode together with Katie Holms for the #TechConfessions channel.I talked a lot about digitalization, how it affects us in our industry, but also how the pace evolved over the last years, but the visible steps seem smaller.