Functions — The Language of Machine Learning Series: Mastering AI/ML from First Principles Phase: Math Foundations Blog #: 03 Topic: Algebra for Machine Learning → Functions - The Language of Machine Learning In my previous post, I got comfortable with numbers and variables. But something still felt incomplete. I could… Read More

Numbers, Variables, and Why ML Needs Math Series: Mastering AI/ML from First Principles Phase: Math Foundations Blog #: 02 Topic: Algebra for Machine Learning → Numbers, Variables, and Why ML Needs Math When I started seriously exploring machine learning, I kept hearing the same advice: That statement always felt incomplete. Read More

What Is AI/ML and Why I’m Learning It Series: Mastering AI/ML from First Principles Phase: Orientation Blog Number: 01 Why AI/ML matters now Artificial Intelligence is no longer a niche research topic. It now shapes search, recommendations, forecasting, fraud detection, language tools, image systems, and a growing share of modern… Read More

Deploying the Modernized 3-Tier Application on Kubernetes In the previous parts of this series we: In this final part we deploy the application on Kubernetes, recreating the original architecture using Kubernetes primitives. The key goal is to demonstrate how a traditional architecture can move to Kubernetes without rewriting the application… Read More

Preparing the Application for Kubernetes In the previous article, I completed an important milestone in the modernization journey of my demo application. The entire stack can now run using Docker Compose, including: At this point the application is fully containerized and reproducible. Running the system locally requires only a single… Read More

Running the Application with Docker Compose In the previous article, I containerized the main components of my VM-based 3-tier application by creating Docker images for the Flask application and the FastAPI backend. At that point, the services were packaged, but they were still isolated. The next step was to run… Read More

Containerizing the Application with Docker In the previous article, I prepared the application for containerization by removing the VM-specific assumptions that were embedded in the code. Two key changes were made: These changes allow configuration to be supplied dynamically through environment variables, which is a core requirement for containerized applications. Read More

Preparing the Application for Containerization In the previous article, I introduced the VM-based 3-tier application that I built and explained how the system works across its three tiers: The architecture itself is solid and does not need to change immediately. However, the deployment model is tightly coupled to virtual machines. Read More

Understanding the Original Architecture Over the years I’ve built several small demo environments to explain infrastructure and cloud concepts to customers and engineers. One of the most useful demos I created was a simple 3-tier application deployed entirely on virtual machines. You can check the application in the earlier blog… Read More

This is the 3rd and final part of the series. In this part I will detail about how to use and deploy the application manually or using supplied OVA. Please check the earlier posts for the details of other layers (Part 1 and Part 2) I have made few changes in the… Read More

In the first part of this two part series I detailed about the application. After further consideration and feedbacks I have made some changes in it. In this post I am going to talk about the changes and various ways we can use this application. In the initial architecture of the application… Read More

Purpose: I work as a multi-cloud solution architect and as part of the job, often times, I give demos to customers or build specific use cases for them. While doing so I am always looking for an application which is lightweight, is useful (replicates real life use case) and uses… Read More

Hello Everyone, after a long gap I am back at blogging. One of the reasons of my absence was my VCDX journey. In this blog I will detail the lessons I learned during my journey in the hope this will help others in their journey. There are several areas which… Read More

Purpose This is the second post on VMware Cloud Services specifically on Cloud Assembly(CAS). In this post I am going to talk about tags and inputs. As always, I will record a video on the same topics as well. This is for those friends who are more inclined towards visual… Read More

Purpose This is going to be a series of posts deep diving on VMware Cloud Assembly Services (CAS). In this series I am going to talk about different aspects of VMware Cloud Assembly Services, e.g tags, projects, blueprints etc. As always, I will record a video on the same topics… Read More

Purpose I wrote a blog on Auto-Scaling and got many questions regarding that topic. Also, after the release of vRealize Automation 7.3.1 onwards, the workflows stopped working. So, this post has the answer to all those questions and the updated package which will work with vRealize Automation versions upwards from 7.3. Though… Read More

Purpose I recently moved my blog from Wordpress to Hexo. Also, I moved hosting platform from Siteground to S3 (AWS). This blog post details the rationale behind the decisions. It also describes how I learnt to build a Hexo theme using VMware Clarity environment. So overall this captures the following… Read More

Purpose: Recently I got a request to build a Weblogic-as-a-Service in vRealize Automation for a customer. This post provides details of that custom built Out-of-the-Box Oracle Weblogic-as-a-Service in vRealize Automation. The requirement is to deploy a Weblogic Cluster as a whole. Also, user should be able to choose any number… Read More

Purpose: I am attending this year's VMworld US and decided to write my experience so far. Read on to know what's new with VMware and other technologies. First, this is an amazing experience. If you are someone working with VMware technologies, then at least once you need to be in… Read More

Purpose: Did you ever have the need to manually edit the vRealize Automation vPostgres database? This post covers exactly that topic. It provides detailed steps on how you can access the database and modify it. So without further ado start reading the post. There are times when we are forced… Read More

Purpose: The first part of the post dealt with "Out of the box Shared DB as a Service". In addition to other points, where I explained about Shared DB as a Service using a vRO package. Limitation of that package is, it only creates the DB in real Database. Created databases do… Read More

Purpose: This blog post provides details of shared DB-as-a-Service capability in vRealize Automation. This functionality provided by vRO workflows. A vRO package was created and is available here. Details of the required tools and configuration steps are also provided. Also, the repository details of the package given. Introduction: In last… Read More

Purpose: Do you want to create custom dynamic groups in vROps which matches the tags created in vCenter server? You can do this manually, but you have large number of tags created. How to tackle that programmatically? This post covers the exact point. Read on to know how you can… Read More

Purpose: Have you checked the auto-scaling feature provided in public cloud solutions like AWS and Azure and wished to get the same feature in your private cloud environment? Do you have an existing private cloud environment or building a new one and want to make it auto-scale enabled? This post… Read More

Purpose: Did you ever feel the need to push custom data to vRealize Operations Manager (vROps)? Did you wish, you could see that one parameter or metric specific to your environment in vROps? This post provides exactly that information. Here I demonstrate a script which pushes custom data into vROps. Read More

Purpose: Few customers inquired about how they can collect metric values directly from vROps. They majorly wanted to get that information using REST API's. I wrote another blog post detailing how you can do it. I wrote a python script to automatically collect metric values from vROps. This post provides… Read More

Purpose: vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) is an absolutely amazing and must have tool for any virtualised datacenter. Out of the box (OOTB), it provides a lot of functionalities. Unlike custom dashboards and super metrics, REST API's are less explored areas of vROps. For notifications, we typically use "Send an Email"… Read More

Purpose: If you are working in Virtualization and Cloud space, then you must have heard about Software Defined Storage (SDS). It is part of Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) (a term coined by VMware). Since VMware started the SDDC journey and is a pioneer in this technology, so, today I am going… Read More

Purpose: This post is aimed towards anyone who does a lot of Log Analysis. In this post I showcased the capabilities of VMware vRealize Log Insight. This will enable you to confidently utilise this tool to not only analyse the diverse logs that you can think of but also visualise the… Read More

Purpose: Automation in a virtualised datacenter is must for any IT-Admin. PowerShell is perhaps the most important tool in such virtualised datacenter. For VMware environment PowerCLI provides that capability to the admins. This is the second session on PowerCLI, covering the advance topics. If you are just starting or plan to… Read More

Purpose: Today I got to demo advance capabilities and various possibilities in & around vRA 7.2 (vRealize Automation) to an audience. This involved auto-scaling, on-demand load balancers, application authoring and containers. So, if you are a cloud admin or infra admin and wondering what features you can implement using vRA,… Read More

Purpose: Automation in datacenter is a must for any IT-Admin. And scripting is the most important skill they can have. PowerShell is the most important scripting language in today's virtualised environment. This is a session on basics of PowerShell and PowerCLI which I did for a customer. If you are just starting… Read More

Purpose: The purpose of this post is to show how to automate infrastructure in virtualized dataceter through vRealize Code Stream and using other tools like Artifactory. Target audience for this post are System Admins, Cloud Admins etc. who are not full fledged developers but has some experience in scripting and automation… Read More

Purpose: Recently I got a request to from my colleague Raminder Singh to deliver a session for customers on vRealize Automation (vRA). Though vRealize Automation is generally available for few years, still it seems there are challenges faced by customers. Specially if they are trying it out for the first… Read More

Purpose: The purpose of this post is to show how to build XaaS services in vRealize Automation (vRA) by using available API's in vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). Target audience for this post is System Admins, Cloud Admins etc. who are not full fledged developers but has some experience in scripting and build Blueprints… Read More

Why this post? Dear Readers, this is the second and last part of the series on integrating NSX with vRealize Automation. Initially I thought of writing three separate blogs on this topic covering Integration, Consumption and Result. But then due to the size I decided to put a video and… Read More

Purpose Did you ever wonder or faced the following questions from a customer regarding vRealize Operations Manager? If your answer is yes to any of the above, then this blog is for you. Before I go ahead and discuss the above questions, let's cover some basics first. Monitoring can be defined as… Read More

Purpose NSX and vRealize Automation are two major products from VMware. You use vRealize Automation to build a Cloud environment and use NSX for building a Software-Defined-Network environment. Individually they are awesome products and when you mix them up, you get an overdose of awesomeness. Fun apart, the actual power of… Read More

Dear Reader, this is the second part of the vROPS for NSX post. In the earlier Part I post I have discussed about the installation and configuration of the PAK file in vROPs environment. In this part I am going to discuss the results of the configuration, i.e, what information we… Read More

Hello, My last post was about monitoring NSX environment using vRealize Network Insight. That is an amazing tool and a must have if you have NSX in your environment. In the meantime I thought of writing a post on using vRealize Operations (vRops) to monitor NSX environment. This is going… Read More

Hi Reader, I am back with another blog. I thought of writing a series of blogs on vRealize Automation. It seems not enough is discussed about the internal architecture and the generic configuration steps are too complex and needs some explanations. But before I do that, I thought of sharing… Read More

Hey guys, hope you are doing good. Few days back I discussed about the choice between a distributed deployment and a simple one. Near the end I said, if you want to do a distributed deployment then it is better that we use a virtual load balancer like NSX. So… Read More

The most awaited feature is finally here. Never thought I would see Microsoft saying they love Linux and open source. But I suppose this was on the cards cause you can not ignore a vast population of IT landscape. So finally PowerShell is here for Linux and Mac environment.Here is… Read More

Hello all, it’s been long since my last blog. In between, I became a father, changed profile, changed location etc., in all a lot happened at personal and professional front. Coming back to blog, this particular topic was bugging me from last couple of months. In few of my last discussions with customers,… Read More

vRealize Automation 7.0 Configuration: This is the last part of the series on vRealize Automation 7.0 installation and configuration. Since I have already covered the installation part, so in this post I am going to cover only the configuration part. NOTE: In all these posts I have covered only the… Read More

Purpose This is the second part of the three part series of vRealize Automation 7.0 installation and configuration blog series. In this part I am going to take a closer look at the installation of IaaS server through initial Wizard. Pre-Requisites Before we go ahead and start the installation and… Read More

On 17th December VMware released much awaited new version of vRealize Automation which is 7.0. The major new changes and additions for this version are provided below: What's New in vRA 7.0 Deployment and Initial Configuration: The entire installation process for vRA has changed completely. With this version the installation process… Read More

Hello All, Hope you are doing well. Today I want to talk about remotely executing scripts inside a VM which is hosted in vSphere environment. Recently I received the following requirement from a colleague for a customer. Environment: Customer has hundreds of VMs A particular application is running in many… Read More

Today I am going to talk about an interesting feature of PowerCLI. Through PowerCLI you can utilize the full functionalities of ESXCLI commands. Question is why would you like to access Esxcli commands from PowerCLI cmdlets. The reason is there are certain tasks which can easily be done using Esxcli… Read More

This is the last one in the custom dashboard series. In part 1 of the series I had covered about what I wanted to achieve and the general structure of the dashboard. In the second part I covered how we actually built the custom dashboard and the user roles. In… Read More

In the previous post I informed about the general structure of the dashboard. In this post I am going to go deeper and talk about how exactly I built the solution. For this I created a new dashboard by the name "Organization Details". There is a very good and detailed… Read More

Purpose: Recently I had a request from a customer to build a custom Dashboard for vRealize Operations Manager for their environment. I thought of sharing my experience with you so that in the process I can show how to build a solution to a requirement. In doing so I will… Read More

Purpose of the Script: If you are an admin who manages a vSphere environment then you are in the right place. How many times did you wish for a report that would give you a holistic view of capacity of your environment? Well, I know you can get that from… Read More

Dear Readers, It's been long since I have written a blog. But as promised, we will collaborate here and continue to work towards making the scripts more stable and incorporate more features into it. Towards that goal I am writing this blog. When run, the script will automatically check whether… Read More

In earlier post I talked about what is virtualization. In this post I am going to talk about types of Virtualization and their difference. Virtualization Areas: Nowadays virtualization is applicable to everything. As mentioned in the earlier post: Even something as simple as partitioning a hard drive is considered virtualization… Read More

Hello All, There is another way. If you follow the previous post there would be a problem . In ITBM standard appliance by default the following lines are on : Server 127.0.0.1 fudge 127.0.0.1 stratum 10 So, when you check the time with ntpq –pn you would see that by… Read More

Guys, Recently I was deploying ITBM Standard suite and faced the following: Purpose: I need to configure a NTP server in ITBM Standard Appliance. Reason: There is a time drift between ITBM appliance and vCAC & Identity appliance, so ITBM registration with vCAC fails. [ vCAC & Identity appliance are… Read More

Why this post? In recent past in my interaction with couple of college students and other technology professionals I could see that there is some confusion about virtualization and related technologies. Though many knows the tools and end options but again confused by the technology behind. So I decided to… Read More

Hello Everyone,this is my first blog.Before I go ahead and talk about any other technologies I would like to talk about my Home Lab setup. Like many others I do not have dedicated servers at my home so I work around the limitations and get my lab going. By no… Read More