Before I decided to run a Linux based, headless installation of VirtualBox, I had been running all my virtual machines in VMware Workstation. When it was time to switch I exported a number of virtual machines that I had already built to OVF format. These were servers like Windows with Active Directory, GIT, Ansible, that I didn’t want to go
Year: 2017
Today I started work on something that has peeked my interest for a while, switching my server to CentOS running VirtualBox in headless mode. I had long been a fan of VMware Workstation, back in the day, it was more feature rich than Vbox and provided better memory management features. Alas, that is not the case today and with VirtualBox’s
I’ve never been a developer so getting into JavaScript was quite a challenge at first and I probably always went the longest route possible to achieve something. As I use it more and more, I am picking up these neat little tricks and uses for built in methods that make my life easier. In the world of vRA and vRO,
I was optimising some vRO actions today and came across something that always annoys me when I see it, badly formed IF statements (for one of a better description). When I write my code, I have learned that formatting and consistency is key to produce code that is easier to read and understand. I also like to keep things simple.
The vCenter plugin has a very useful method for retrieving a list of objects quickly and easily. However, if your inventory is quite large, then this can be quite slow. There are two ways that this can be improved. 1) only retrieve the attributes that are useful for our code requirements, 2) use an XPATH query filter to limit the
I do a lot of work that involves either creating new virtual hard disks or attaching existing ones to virtual machines in VMware vSphere. I do all of this through vRealize Orchestrator, written in JavaScript (yum). As part of this task, I always ensure that the datastores that I am creating disks on have sufficient capacity for these new disks.
When a vRO workflow or action is called from vRA, additional input parameters (in addition to those specified as the workflow/action inputs) are provided in the Execution Context object of the workflow. These can be very useful as they contain additional data that can be used inside the workflows. A couple of good examples would be the user that requested
Nothing frustrates me more than returning to the vRA UI, clicking something and then have it immediately log me out. This appears to be quite random a lot of the time and whilst I can appreciate that this is in the interest of security, I find it a little too aggressive. This can be changed by extending the life of the