Category Archives: vDM30in30

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November 7, 2014

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PowerCLI, vDM30in30

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PowerShell Command Add-On

Many of us use PowerCLI, which relies on PowerShell. The default PowerCLI environment is pretty plain, but you can also use the PowerShell ISE  and load the PowerCLI snap-ins in your profile. The ISE, or Integrated Scripting Environment, offers a lot of advantages to the regular PowerCLI or PowerShell interfaces: Intellitype, lots of keyboard shorts, and something called the Command Add-On.

First, let’s look at how to turn it on. Fire up the ISE. If you have Powershell pinned on your taskbar, you can right click and choose the ISE, or just hit the windows key and type ‘ISE’. You want the regular version of PowerShell ISE, not the “(x86)” version. Now that it’s open, go to View -> Show Command Add-On and select it:

fig 1

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November 7, 2014

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Social Media, vDM30in30

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To favorite or to retweet

The favorite and retweet buttons have distinct purposes they were intended for in Twitter, though of course not everyone uses them as our Twitter gods intended they be used.

Retweet

This is how you accomplish two things: 1) Sharing a tweet you found worthy of sharing. 2) Promoting the author’s tweet for more visibility. Retweeting is a way of saying, “Check this out, I like it!”

Favorite

A favorite is more like a bookmark. Instead of having to scroll through your timeline, a favorite is always available at https://twitter.com/favorites or under the Favorites button in your client of choice. You can use this to reference a tweet when you want to, or view a link in the tweet later on a different device, and then uncheck it when you don’t want to remember it later. Favoriting is a way of saying, “I want to look at this tweet later.”

Neither is a Like

Don’t treat twitter like the book of faces. Favoriting a tweet isn’t a way to tell other people that it’s a great tweet, in fact it won’t show up on your timeline and only the author will be notified of your favorite. Someone would have to be stalking you to check out your favorites, and while that’s a possibility, it’s not as noticeable as a retweet. Likewise, if you want to save something for later, retweeting it WILL make it show up on your “Me” page, but it can still get pushed further down the timeline, so it’s not as memorable as a favorite.

This isn’t obvious and it took me a while to figure out the difference, but there is one. I don’t expect anyone to change their behavior based on this – in fact, the twitterverse will disappoint me if the twitter announcement of this post isn’t favorited by everyone – but I just had to say something 🙂

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November 7, 2014

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DevOps, PowerCLI, vDM30in30

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Use existing definitions as a baseline

Sometimes we spend way too long trying to define things in our head when we can get existing configurations from the system. It’s vital to have a full service definition or any promotion of the service through environments will turn up missing components and make your life hell. If you’re building a new service that looks similar to an old one, or evolves the old service, steal the old service’s definition and then modify it.

vSphere

There are a number of ways to gather existing service definitions. If you’re building a new host and you have Enterprise Plus licenses, use Host Profiles. Export an existing host’s config to a host profile, uncheck the irrelevant portions, change what’s relevant but different, and apply to the new host. It might take a few tweaks, but you’ll get it right soon. Then export the new host’s config to a host profile and you’re good to go.

If you don’t have Enterprise Plus, take a look at PowerCLI. It will take more legwork, but there are a ton of cmdlets available to capture networking, storage, and other service definitions from existing hosts which you can then apply elsewhere.

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November 6, 2014

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Puppet, vDM30in30

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Migrating away from Puppet’s deprecated import feature

The import keyword in Puppet has been deprecated and will be removed in Puppet v4. That’s good to know, but what can you do about it if you’re using it? Let’s take a look at how it might be used. All directories below are relative to your environment directories, such as /etc/puppet/environments/production, unless a full path is given (starts with /).

Current Setup

Here’s what your site manifest might look like:

#manifests/site.pp
import nodes/*pp

When Puppet starts, it looks at all the *pp files in the nodes directory and loads them. Those files might look like this, one for each node or node-class:

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November 6, 2014

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vDM30in30

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Entering #vDM30in30 late

Some of you may have seen #vDM30in30 on Twitter recently. It’s based off a 30 blogs in 30 days challenge by Greg Ferro to get people using blogs, both to encourage people to write more, but also as a social media. I think it’s a great idea. Social media isn’t just Twitter, or FaceBook, or LinkedIn, etc, and one of those has some significant character restrictions, plus writing always benefits from repetition.

The #vDM30in30 challenge was started by the crew of virtualdesignmaster.com to encourage people to write one blog post a day for 30 days. I’m taking it in a slightly different direction. I already write at least one post a week, so to encourage the blog as a form of social media, I’m doing an extra 30 posts in the month of December. They’ll all be in the vDM30in30 category and it will be more than one a day, most likely, but much shorter than my normal technical or opinion pieces.

I encourage anyone reading to take this challenge for yourself, in whatever version suits you. If you’d like to participate but don’t have your own blog, find me on twitter as rnelson0 and I’d be glad to have a guest author on my blog. Enjoy!