First things first, if you prefer to consume video content, the same content that is in this blog post is in the video below. If you prefer to read, please skip past the video and read on! Secrets Management Microsoft have recently released an update to a PowerShell module they’ve been working on for a short while now which is everything to do with management of secrets. Version 3 of the Secret Management PowerShell module was released last week and it is a decent update from version 2, so much so that it includes breaking changes, as can be expected with preview releases.

This is a short post and I’ll cut straight to it. I’m really happy to announce that I’ve published my first course with Pluralsight, Extending PowerShell. The course is aimed at helping you learn and understand PowerShell Modules and is part of a larger learning path for PowerShell 7 that is being produced currently on PowerShell. I have worked hard to make this demo heavy in a way that you can follow along with each task, and I hope you do, as the hands-on is where the knowledge gets solidified.

Introduction I’ve recently been working on building a video course titled “Azure Functions for DevOps Engineers”, and I’m really happy to announce that the course is now live on the CloudSkills.io platform. For the next week or so, the course is available for $7 USD (yep, seven), and I know I’m biased, but I think that’s a great deal! If you head on over to check it out, I’d also recommend browsing through the other content available at CloudSkills, there’s been so much success from students of the courses and there’s also some awesome upcoming workshops planned that you can enroll for.

The VMware VMUG UserCon has been my favourite local (Australian) event since attending my first one in 2017. It is one of the standout events for community sessions and networking and one I personally look forward to every year. The teams involved with VMUG and especially the local VMUG members in Sydney and Melbourne do a fantastic job every year of bringing everyone together and handling the logistics. Things will of course be different this year with the event going virtual, but I’m still looking forward to it on Thursday the 30th of July, 2020.

Introduction Microsoft recently released a PowerShell module named Az.Functions, providing cmdlets to manage the Azure Functions Service. According to the PowerShell Gallery, version 1.0.0 was released on the 19th of May, followed by 1.0.1 on the 23rd of June (2 days ago). Az.Functions is now included as part of the wider Az module, so if you install the entire Az PowerShell module, you’ll automatically receive Az.Functions. In this post, we’ll take a 101 look at some of the cmdlets that are included in this initial release.

This might not be a new one to a lot of folk, but it certainly was to me! This week I was proactively updating some NIC driver and firmware for a customer to avoid a known issue where the FCoE driver could cause an ESXi Purple Screen of Death (PSOD). Both firmware and drivers needed to be upgraded to maintain interoperability. While I am very much looking forward to vSphere Lifecycle Manager (finally!

Introduction Towards the end of 2019, I made a decision to aim for a certification in one of the primary public clouds. The decision on which cloud to focus on was relatively simple for me for a couple of reasons: Microsoft certianly seem to be doing awesome things with Azure and it feels like there is a lot of hype around Azure in the circles I travel in, at least more so than GCP or AWS I work for a partner and while not specifically in the team that are delivering public cloud solutions and managed services, we are currently 100% focused on Azure and are a Microsoft triple gold partner.

This one is just a quick post regarding an issue I came up against just before Christmas. To get straight to the point, I found an issue where in multiple separate environments, when cloning a virtual machine via the VMware vCenter HTML5 Web client interface, if you select the tick box to “customize this virtual machine’s hardware” and change any of the settings of the VM, the cloned virtual machine’s VMDK file(s) will be pointed to the VMDK file(s) of the source machine you used for the clone.

I was recently involved in an issue in an evnironment that started out looking like a simple SSL certificate replacement and ended with multiple hours of troubleshooting with GSS and redeployment of vSphere Replication. Fun times, right?! Let’s take a step back. This customer has a straight forward environment. Two physical sites, one vCenter Server and external PSC per site (6.5) in the same single sign on domain. Each site had one vSphere replication appliance and one Site Recovery Manager Server, version 8.

We had a customer recently that upgraded from vSphere 6.5 to 6.7 and following the upgrade to 6.7, virtual machines were sporadically being reset by vSphere HA with the following message in the vCenter event log: Error message on <VM Name> on <Host Name> in <Cluster>: VMware ESX unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0) vmk: vcpu-0:Unable to decompress BPN(0x100018003) from frameIndex(0x3d4aa2) block 1 for VM(2103599) We got this logged with GSS quickly and after being sent on a bit of a goose chase with firmware and driver upgrades (the versions we were running we compatible, but not latest), GSS noted that 5 other cases has been logged over the past couple of days with this same issue.