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Full Disclosure: This blogpost is written for and part of the VMware vExpert NSX Certification blogging campaign. A long long time ago when i was still making my first steps in the wonderful world of IT, my role was that of the go-to operations guys for small-medium businesses.

Currently i’m working on a NSX project that involves automation of NSX loadbalancers to provide loadbalancing as a catalog item. Now, while i would normally prefer deploying dedicated loadbalancers on-demand, a big constraint in this environment is the fact that the ISP takes a significant time to configure the GSLB for new services, so on-demand loadbalancers go straight out of the window.

TL;DR: if you’re just interested in how to configure orchestrator to allow puppetDB querying, follow the link . PuppetDB is an extension to Puppet allowing you to aggregate data from Puppet nodes such as custom facts, catalogs and resources.

As you may know, vRealize Automation 7 brought us a great deal of improvements, one of which is the composite blueprint and the software components. With the new release of vRA 7.

As i was working with some of the new puppet 4 functions, i noticed that most documentation for node classification still refers to hiera_include for the purpose of node classification and class inclusion.

People that know me might be aware of the fact that i’m a strong proponent of using powerCLI, due to its power of allowing the simple yet powerful automation of single tasks (you should be using Orchestrator for recurring tasks, but even that can use powerCLI) as well as the great runbook scripting capatibility for new deployments, upgrades, migrations and disaster recovery.

As part of a microsegmentation project, we’re also doing the full implementation of the DFW ruleset to isolate and categorize application tiers and inter-tier traffic. Since implementing these rules manually would be very labour-intensive and the risk of manual errors are always lurking, the obvious way would be to automate this.

While the subject has come up quite a bit, it’s still mostly shrouded in mystery and getting a proper answer on what does and doesn’t work usually requires some shady voodoo rituals.

In most of my projects, powershell and its vendor-specific modules such as VMware’s powercli is usually a necessity to work effectively. In addition, most customers appreciate it greatly if you can leave them with a handful of examples on how to run standard procedures through a script, even though it might not always be part of the deliverables.

About me # Hi. I’m Sjors, the author of this blog and the person you’re currently reading about. I’ve been working in IT since 1999 in various functions, from support desk to frontend development, Cisco network engineering, Linux engineer and currently mainly focused on technical consultancy, specifically the design and implementation of VMware NSX.