Indeni, Smart Advisors and Crowd-Sourcing
Monitoring needs to move on from traditional fault and performance polling. It should include identifying common misconfigurations and known faults. We’re all using the same technologies, so we’ve all got the same problems. I like the look of Indeni, a new approach to this problem. It uses a form of crowd-sourcing to act as a smart advisor.
Precious Snowflakes?
We all think we’re precious snowflakes. But we’re not. We use the same technologies, glued together in the same ways. That means we all have the same problems, and make the same misconfigurations.
Vendors frequently publish new bug fixes, KB articles, EOS notices, etc. Some of these apply to products/versions/features we’re using. We struggle to keep up with the volume, and we miss these – so maybe our network is running with a known issue. Striking an unknown bug is bad. Getting caught out by a published issue is worse. Having an outage because we didn’t make sure the routing tables were in sync on our firewall cluster is unforgivable.
Vendors Need Help Too
Information flow is a two-way problem. The vendors can’t always see how customers deploy their products in the real world. They think they know. They write manuals, they write Continue reading
Managing VMware vSphere guests with Ansible Tower
There are lots of ways to enable self-service VMs within an organisation - what some might call 'a private cloud'. However, these usually require layers and layers of complex software. What if you could leverage your existing hypervisor and 15 lines of code to do the same? And what if those 15 lines became an even simpler single click?
Ansible Core contains a module for managing virtual machines in VMware vSphere environments called vsphere_guest. Using this one module we can talk to an existing vSphere instance to create new VMs, clone VM templates, and control and delete VMs. Couple up a simple playbook with Ansible Tower and we can do some pretty amazing things with very little effort.
Here's our playbook to create a new virtual machine from a template in vSphere:
The really important bit that's doing the work is the 15 lines associated with the 'Create VM from template' task. Note the extensive use of variables in this play to give us lots of flexibility. We'll make use of this in Tower in just a moment.
Tower 2.1 introduced 'Surveys', which are a great way to create interactive forms for a given play. The form can Continue reading