The following is a list of the technical skills and exams/certification that I am looking to obtain within the next 12 months. I am putting this out in the public domain so that I try and stick to it.
VMware
VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6 - Cloud Management and Automation Design- Completed - 03/2016VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6 - Cloud Management and Automation Deploy- Completed - 07/2017VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6 - Data Center Virtualisation Design- Completed - 03/2016VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6 - Data Center Virtualisation Deploy- Completed - 11/2016VMware Certified Professional 6 - Network Virtualisation- Completed - 03/2017VMware Certified Professional 7 - Cloud Management and Automation- Added 06/2017 - Completed - 06/2017VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6 - Network Virtualization - Added 06/17 -Scheduled for Q3 -Completed 09/2017- VMware Certified Advanced Professional 7 - Cloud Management and Automation Deploy - Added 06/17 - awaiting release.
VMware Certified Advanced Professional 7 - Cloud Management and Automation Design -Added 06/17 - Completed 09/2017.VMware Certified Professional 6.5 - Data Center Virtualisation- Added 10/17 - Completed 2017- VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 - Data Center Virtualisation Design - Added 10/17 - Completed Q4 2018
- VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 - Data Center Virtualisation Deploy - Added 10/17 - awaiting release.
VMware VCDX
- VMware VCDX6 DCV submission or VMware VCDX6 CMA submission - on hold subject to a suitable design
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate - Schedule for Q4 2017 (Updated)
- AWS Certified SysOps - Associate - **Scheduled for Q1 2018 **(Updated)
- AWS Certified Developer - Associate - **Schedule for Q4 2017 **(Updated)
Microsoft** **
- Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure - Scheduled for Q4 2017 (Updated)
- Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate: Cloud Platforms - Scheduled for Q2 2018 (Updated)
- Microsoft Certified Associate: Windows 2016 - Scheduled for Q4 2017 (Updated)
Will I obtain all of the certifications? Maybe not but at least it will give me a focus!
Written by Christopher Lewis on November 10, 2016.
Just over a week until the UK VMUG 2016. This will be my first year in attendance and after a really good VMworld Barcelona I’m looking forward to it. Whilst only a single day (if you excluded the vCurry the night before) I am hoping it will be successful in capturing the essence of VMworld.
There seemed to be a big focus on VMware User Group in the VMware EMEA Solution Exchange this year, both around promotion of the “free to join” standard membership and the “pay for” VMUG Advantage membership. Personally, this is my second year as a VMUG Advantage Member and the discounts on Exams and VMworld attendance has basically paid for the membership. Albeit when there are no more exams to do, I’m sure it will start costing me money… wait… when is there never any VMware exams to do?
Written by Christopher Lewis on November 7, 2016.
The Series
- Configuring SSL certificates for vRA 7.x (inc vRO)
- Replacing the Appliance Management Site Certificate for vRealize Automation
- Replacing the Control Center Certificate on an embedded vRO instance
- Replacing the Package Signing Certificate in vRO 7
Replacing the Certificate
This is the final post in a series tackling the extra certificates you may want to replace once you have deployed vRealize Automation.
This is relatively straightforward to accomplish, but @SpasKaloferov covers this well in his article http://kaloferov.com/blog/how-to-change-the-ssl-certificate-of-a-vro-appliance-7-x/ so there is no point me re-inventing the wheel.
Written by Christopher Lewis on November 5, 2016.
VMware vRealize Automation vRealize Orchestrator Certificates
The Series
- Configuring SSL certificates for vRA 7.x (inc vRO)
- Replacing the Appliance Management Site Certificate for vRealize Automation
- Replacing the Control Center Certificate on an embedded vRO instance
- Replacing the Package Signing Certificate in vRO 7
Replacing the Certificate
This is the third post in a series tackling the extra certificates you may want to replace once you have deployed vRealize Automation.
There are plenty of articles on changing the SSL certificate for this website https://vra-fqdn:8283/vco-vcoconfigurator on an External instance of vRealize Orchestrator, most notably is @SpasKaloferov ’s post http://kaloferov.com/blog/how-to-change-the-ssl-certificate-of-a-vro-appliance-7-x/
Written by Christopher Lewis on November 5, 2016.
VMware vRealize Automation vRealize Orchestrator Certificates
The Series
- Configuring SSL certificates for vRA 7.x (inc vRO)
- Replacing the Appliance Management Site Certificate for vRealize Automation
- Replacing the Control Center Certificate on an embedded vRO instance
- Replacing the Package Signing Certificate in vRO 7
Replacing the Certificate
This is the second post in a series tackling the extra certificates you may want to replace once you have deployed vRealize Automation.
After a quick look around the VMware Documentation Center and I found the article for replacing the VAMI certificate ( https://vra.fqdn:5480 ). The VAMI certificate can be replaced using the same SAN certificate used for the vRA Virtual Appliance during the installation wizard, but it will need to be converted to Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) format to do so.
Written by Christopher Lewis on November 5, 2016.
So when deploying vRealize Automation, I can be bit OCD when it comes to certificates and websites. Where possible/plausible, I like to make sure all of the sites in the deployment have trusted certificates especially if there is a root CA in play (after all they’re free certificates right?).
After deploying the VMware vRealize Automation 7.x appliance from the OVA (that’s the easy bit) and successfully (normally on the second/third attempt) running through the deployment wizard to deploy a Medium distributed environment. We end up with certificates for the following components:
Written by Christopher Lewis on November 5, 2016.
vRealize vRealize Automation vRealize Orchestrator Certificates
So we all know that generating SSL certificates are something out of the Dark Arts and unforgivable spells akin to the wizarding world of Harry Potter.
So the following is a quick post on how to take the certificate (.cer or .crt file) from the Certificate Authority CA, combine it with the RSA Private Key (.key file) and the Root CA Chain (another .cer/.crt file) to firstly create the intermediate Personal Exchange Format (PFX) file and finally create the Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) File.
Written by Christopher Lewis on November 5, 2016.
SSL Certificates VMware vRealize Automation vRealize Orchestrator
OK so you’ve finally deployed vRealize Automation 7.x and you’re pretty chuffed with yourself because it only two 2 rollbacks on the Windows VMs, a new VA deployment and some on the fly configuration tweaks to get it working… You’re #Awesome.
You’re following VMware best practice and you have your embedded vRealize Orchestrator instance on your vRealize Automation Virtual Appliance(s). You #RockThisWorld
You’re on a role. but now you now have to install a new plugin for vRealize Orchestrator (lets say for Infoblox IPAM or F5 LTM), so you try https://vra.fqdn:8281/vco like you did on the vRO 6 appliance but get a “this site cannot be reached” message. You then remember, configuration was on 8283, so you try https://vra.fqdn:8283/vco-confg again with no luck and a “this site cannot be reached” message.
Written by Christopher Lewis on November 4, 2016.
The last day of VMworld came along sooner than I expected.
I decided to drop most of my sessions and just chill out in the hang space. Why did I drop the last few sessions? because I’d finally realised I’d been doing VMworld all wrong…
It dawned on me that whilst over the last 3 days the sessions I had attended re-enforced by knowledge, it didn’t (on the whole) enhance it. I’d chosen the wrong path. On the whole, I had chosen sessions on topics I already had in-depth knowledge on in the hope that some new information/wisdom would be imparted during the sessions. It suddenly dawned on me that actually, the majority of the sessions were not really geared towards the #vExperts or Consultants who do this for there job day in and day out, but for the VMware customers who wanted to know more but didn’t know where to look. In an average 1 hour session, I found maybe 5-10 minutes of useful information. Which wasn’t a great return on my time investment. The sessions I had attended were (on the whole) great, but the vast majority of the sessions I could watch on playback either from VMworld US or VMworld EMEA after the event.
Written by Christopher Lewis on October 25, 2016.
- Operating a Private Cloud - Part 3: Creating a Pricing Card in VMware Aria Automation
- Operating a Private Cloud - Part 2: Creating a Pricing Card in VMware Aria Operations
- Operating a Private Cloud - Part 1: Understanding Pricing Cards in VMware Aria
- Zero2Hero - Using Aria Automation to Deploy Multiple Machines with Multiple Disks - Part 5
- Zero2Hero - Using Aria Automation to Deploy Multiple Machines with Multiple Disks - Part 4