Accepted for vExpert 2018 !

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A nice surprise at breakfast in my mailbox. I have been accepted for the VMware vExpert programme! I have been recognised as blogger and public speaker. Link to my public profile is here.

Big thanks to Kim Bottu and Tom Vallons for putting their shoulders under a new vExpert community in the Belux and helping us! Also special thanks to Erik Scholten for endorsing an old colleague…

It is very motivating and I look forward to new ways of putting in some good work for VMware cloud products!

vExpert logo

vExpert 2018

Blue Medora PCF management pack updated

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One of the management packs for VMware vRealize Operations that has evolved the most over the past two years is the Pivotal Cloud Foundry solution. From connecting through our own open -source nozzle to using the BOSH API, Blue Medora now enables you to monitor all aspects of your PCF deployment, including apps. Today we publish yet another set of enhancements. This is one of the most comprehensive solutions on the market to monitor PCF and how it runs on your VMware environment.

PCF Infrastructure dashboard

PCF infrastructure dashboard

Features in this Release Include:

  • Added BOSH Job resource kind, which serves as a catch-all resource for any BOSH job (including BOSH metrics) not covered by other previously-defined resource kinds (See: Resource Kinds and Relationships)
  • Improved alerts and recommendations to align with PCF Key Performance Indicators best practice documentation (See: Alerts)
  • Added one new Advanced Configuration setting: Collect Events (See: Creating an Adapter Instance)
  • Updated Blue Medora Nozzle Tile to include timeseries for historical data to enable improved alerts (NOTE: Be sure to upgrade the management pack prior to upgrading to the new nozzle version. See: Upgrading the Management Pack.)

Blue Medora website product page: https://bluemedora.com/integration/pivotal-cloud-foundry/vmware-vrealize-true-visibility/

HTML Documentation: https://s3.amazonaws.com/docs.bluemedora.com/vROps/PCF/Default.htm

Official Build Number: 3.2.0.20180625.192805

As always contact sales@bluemedora.com for more info.

Great new profile QR code in Linkedin app

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Linkedin published a new version of their iOS app today and it has a feature that I am going to use *a lot* at meetings, VMUGs, conferences… I think it might even revitalise my use of Linkedin. It’s profile QR codes. I heard about it through Engadget.

Basically if you click the QR icon in the search bar in the main screen, it allows you to display a QR code with link to your profile that others can scan. Or you can scan other QR codes. Since Apple now has easy QR scanning in the camera app (just point camera at any QR code), this is a great tool that is going to save me a lot of business cards and scanning in other cards.

My Linkedin profile QR code

My Linkedin profile QR code

Of course you want to make sure to update your contact details and visibility, I added for instance Blue Medora’s product matrix….

New version HPE management pack for vROps released

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Blue Medora has concluded the project to update the vROps Management Pack for HPE Servers.

Updates in this Release Include:

• Added support for iLO 5

• Added least-privileged user (LPU) details for OA, VCM, and iLO users

• Added Prerequisite Configurations for ESXi Hosts topic (required to collect external Host > Server relationship and certain metrics)

• Incorporated 2.0.5 patch release, which added support for HP Blade/VMware Host System relationships based on hostname

• Incorporated 2.0.4 patch release, which fixed an issue where a missing keys exception was taking down collection

HTML Documentation: https://s3.amazonaws.com/docs.bluemedora.com/vROps/HPE-Servers/Default.htm

Official Build Number: 2.1.0.20180606.165223

As always if you are interested in this pack, contact sales@bluemedora.com, more info is on the product page here.

OEM Postgres plugin supports Postgres v10!

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At Blue Medora we still have a very popular plugin for Oracle Enterprise Manager to monitor Postgres databases. With the number of customers moving to Postgres or supporting dual database environments on the rise, it is important to give the DBA the opportunity to keep monitoring his environment from his existing monitoring platform. The plugin integrates in the OEM dashboards and gives you a lot of details on Postgres.

OEM Postgres plugin

OEM Postgres plugin query overview

Last year we upgraded the software to support Postgres databases running on AWS RDS, now at the request of several customers we upgraded to support postgres v10. We also have trial versions available now!

All technical info is on our support site and more product info is – as always – in the product matrix. Please contact sales@bluemedora.com if you are interested in testing the product.

Blue Medora supports vRealize Operations v6.7!

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Good news if you saw the announcement of VMware vRealize Operations v6.7 yesterday. We worked hard with VMware so that all our management packs are ready for use with this new version! The capacity planning engine has been overhauled a lot, so we wrote a KB article to explain the differences.

HPE 3PAR capacity dashboard

HPE 3PAR capacity dashboard

Blue Medora product management have published a partial list of latest versions to use. These also include other updates. The list is not complete yet, but more will follow. For a documentation and data sheets see the product matrix and contact sales there for a demo and trial or email sales@bluemedora.com.

  1. Apache Hadoop (1.1.0.20180322.151724) 
  1. Cisco UCS (3.1.1.20180405.024250) 
  1. Cohesity (1.1.0.20180316.141936) 
  1. Dell PowerEdge (1.2.0.20180404.144806) 
  1. KVM (1.1.0.20180315.202846) 
  1. Lenovo Compute (1.1.0.20180404.154614) 
  1. MEDITECH (1.3.0.20180312.164522) 
  1. Microsoft Azure (1.1.0.20180326.154253) 
  1. Microsoft SCOM (2.1.0.20180316.174713) 
  1. MongoDB (1.1.0.20180316.142042) 
  1. MySQL (2.1.0.20180316.205435) 
  1. NetApp E-Series (1.1.0.20180320.142233) 
  1. Nutanix (1.1.0.20180330.192826) 
  1. Oracle Database (1.2.0.20180319.144115) 
  1. Oracle Enterprise Manager (4.1.0.20180319.192845) 
  1. Pivotal Cloud Foundry (3.1.0.20180316.195000) 
  1. SAP (2.3.0.20180321.155955) 
  1. SAP HANA (2.1.0.20180319.134350) 
  1. SolarWinds (1.1.0.20180316.145743) 
  1. Xen Hypervisor (1.1.0.20180315.203013) 

vRO plugin for HPE 3PAR StoreServ released !

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Blue Medora has released another vrO plugin to help you manage your infrastructure!

Our initial release of a plug-in for HPE 3PAR StoreServ is now generally available.
 
Notable Features Include:
  • A comprehensive Create Datastore workflow that does all the heavy-lifting of provisioning HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage for vCenter
  • 9 additional out-of-the-box workflows for common 3PAR StoreServ administrative tasks, including:
    • Create/Delete Host
    • Create/Delete Volume
    • Create/Delete LUN
  • Exposed WSAPI methods for creating your own custom workflows
  • The ability to import and manage your entire HPE 3PAR StoreServ environment in vRO
More details coming soon, visit www.bluemedora.com for more details!

Moving clouds.. with Docker

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The driving force in IT for me has always been commoditization. There is probably another blog post here, but we moved from the Bios to the processor, to storage and the network. Everything becomes a commodity at some point, or do you still care what BIOS version your server has? If you still have a server?

In 2008 I attended a CloudCamp where people were asking vendors: “but how do I move workloads between cloud providers?”. Of course there was no answer because public cloud was not a commodity back then, it was just an emerging tech and they all wanted to monetize. Compare your AWS prices from back then to now if you don’t believe me…

Today I realize that containers are making cloud a commodity finally. It does not matter if you run your Docker containers in AWS or Azure or other cloud services. The apps and services remain the same. With Docker Enterprise Edition – the vCenter of Docker – you can manage them all from one pane. I realized that even more with the announcement of IBM Cloud support in Docker EE in the keynote this morning. So now you have AWS, Azure and IBM cloud support built-in for your swarm clusters (and soon kubernetes). Google cloud is experimental at the moment I understand. I played around with Docker for Mac CE deploying a swarm to AWS and I must say the experience is seemless.

So there you go: when all your apps run in containers, they can be moved around on different clouds or even run on different ones in one stack!

So where is the ‘spiel’ now you ask? In added services from those cloud providers. IBM showed in the keynote adding image recognition and Watson lookup in a traditional pet store app. Watson, Alexa and the likes are the proprietary differentiators now. For a next blog…

Eclipse day !

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Finally it is here ! The Great American Eclipse day… we found a spot just over the Kentucky border … weather still good. Few clouds. Praying …

Stay tuned ! For those in BELGIUM we have Boudewijn van Spilbeeck with us and we will be on the 19h news !

New MySQL management pack release from @bluemedora

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The MySQL management pack for VMware vRealize Operations Manager is one of the most populair ones at Blue Medora. It gives you monitoring of your MySQL 5.6.x and 5.7.x databases -including queries – and capaciteit planning, right Inside vROps. The latest release of vRealize Operations MP for MySQL is now generally available.
https://bluemedora.com/downloads/vrops_mp_for_mysql

As with all Blue Medora management packs, the dashboard above shows you that we detect all relations from the database to the VM and beyond. Notable Features in this Release Include:
• Implemented overall performance improvements and query optimization
• Removed MySQL on OS, MySQL IOPS, MySQL on VM, and MySQL Top-N Queries Dashboards
• Added MySQL Usage, MySQL Query Analysis, and MySQL on VMware Dashboards
• Removed Memory Capacity for MySQL instances 
• Added new Views and Reports

As with all new releases it includes the great new HTML Documentation.

Important! With this product we have implemented the new versioning scheme, which removes the “6.x” signifier tied to the minimum supported vROps version. The official build number for this release that will be listed in our documentation is 2.0.0.20170719.200055

• Version number:
◦ “2” is the major version.
◦ “0” is the minor version.
◦ “0” is the patch version.
• Build number:
◦ “20170719” is the build date (YYYYMMDD).
◦ “200055” is the build time (hhmmss).