Archives 2014

Some of you may have read my past VMworld posts like;

• A VMworld Public Service Announcement from your favorite #vExpert! ;) (Book your hotel NOW)
• The Ultimate Guide to attending #VMworld 2013 – AND ON A BUDGET!
• The Definitive Guide to Prepare for VMworld 2012 in San Francisco (+#CXIDinner Details)

Well guess what.. the time is here again for this announcement! Which unfortunately has some good news and some bad news!

In 2013 I put that announcement of booking your hotel out in January, great, right? It lets you get ahead of things so you can get that hotel BOOKED! Well, this time I sat on it for a few months, hey the warzone gets in the way… It was on my task list and I finally decided to publish this helpful reminder.

Where the bad news starts to slip in is… I was looking at hotel pricing (using Marriott.com as an example) and HOLY OMG. The “cheapest” hotel I could find while still being near Moscone was $269 a night, then it went $409, $469, and then north of $500.  Oh that was with special discount codes too, to make it “cheaper”.  Yea, it’s time to book things, note: booking a hotel ‘reserves’ the room and you can cancel it at any time in theory.

When you use something like Airbnb you’re charged immediately but the prices tend to be a bit more reasonable.

I’m currently trying to line up my OWN Accommodations but I couldn’t let you suffer the same challenge I did while trying to find what ‘housing’ I’ll be pinned down with come VMworld :)   So get out there and get your booking on! Worst case you can cancel your hotel booking and free it up if you find yourself not attending or such!

<3 Your favorite Warzone #vExpert :)

So there you are, you notice that your VM is running out of disk space on the C: so you take the obvious action of adding additional disk space to your VM.

OMFG WHAT THE HELL IS THIS I CAN’T EXPAND THE DRIVE BECAUSE OF A BDEDRIVE

Yea, that’s right. The stupid BDEDrive which is created as part of the MDT.   You got it solid that this is the clear reason you’re prevented from actually expanding the space on disk!   So what do you do?   Rather than lie to you as I walk through the steps, instead I’d like to refer you to this awesome blog post by Joy Banerjee who does all of the work I’d normally put into a blog post!

I know this happens enough that I wanted to share the link to that blog post because the answer is at your finger tips! 

So be sure to hit up Joy’s blog post and BOOM your problems will be solved! :) <3

http://aikitsupport.com/bde-drive-removal/

Today marks one full year since I’ve begun this journey into the Warzone and oh the many things I’ve encountered in my time here…

Before I go into some of these details I’d like to refer to some of the past posts on this, just for consolidation effort! :)

• 250 days in Afghanistan, lessons learned, experiences and OMG WTF IS THAT

• Afghanistan, it’s as American as Baseball and Apple Pie; @CXI in the Warzone Update!

• Live from Afghanistan, an Update from @CXI – WILL HE TELL US WHAT HE’S DOING?!

• Taking a stand and serving my country; or WTF is @CXI doing in Afghanistan?!?

So one full year in a war-zone that must be pretty crazy, right? Yes. Yes it is.  Over the course of this time I’ve gone through multiple military transitions (in and out) numerous base closures and as time has gone on and we prepare for “draw-down” a significant decrease in standard life services.   That may not sound like much but considering that we were already basically camping, and things have gone down from that point…. Yea, it’s been interesting. :)

Do I enjoy what I am doing? Absolutely.  I personally have a significant impact on the direction of things here and am able to take my decades of experience and put them to good use to equally ensure that our tax dollars aren’t fraudulently wasted, at least not on my watch!

In the short little time I’ve been here my responsibilities as Deputy Technical Director and Storage and Virtualization Lead for all of the efforts here in Afghanistan have been very rewarding.   I unfortunately cannot go into too many details without compromising aspects of the mission but let me just say… This has been an absolutely awesome experience the likes of which are difficult to rival.   The experience itself is not nearly as rewarding as knowing that the knowledge and skills I brought into this theater from years of work in the trenches and leading high performing teams has scaled to make this a case study for success which can be replicated immensely..

Some things which you can only truly experience while living in a warzone (or in some cases, Chicago…)

• Taking a Helicopter to get to work, with a high powered machine gun out the side…
• The incessant and regular explosions, whether controlled or by insurgents.
• [REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED] – Oh how I’d love to be able to share that…
• And more… :)

But this story is not over.   At this point I’m pretty sure I’ll fight this battle out a little longer to ensure everything is ready and in place for the executed draw down of American troops scheduled for 31DEC2014 – After which point I’m out of here and onto the next story where I can continue to do absolutely awesome things.    I get hit up regularly and I respect and appreciate that.   I’ll likely be looking to start that next story in the Nov/Dec to January time frame so if you’re looking feel free to hit me up as we get closer!

As always I’ll continue to update you in the form of tweets, facebook updates, Instagram, Tumblr and more!

Be safe, and on this wonderful Valentines Day <3 :)

On the one hand it is that time of the year again. On the other hand OMG the changes to the #vExpert Program this year are well worth mentioning!!!

All of the scoop and the details can be found here at the official VMware Blog; vExpert 2014 applications are open

And not only is the program proceeding as it had in the past, with the various details I’ve shared in a previous blog post; The Non-definitive guide to the VMware vExpert Program, Tips, Tricks, How to become a vExpert!   But also taking a page out of the Microsoft MVP Programs book, the vExpert program has changed to support quarterly nominations instead of yearly!

The second change is quarterly nominations into the 2014 vExpert program. We will leave the application open year round and at the end of each quarter we will begin the voting process for new vExperts from the previous quarter. So even if you are not picked to become a vExpert 2014 right away, we will allow for quarterly voting and nominations.

Pretty awesome, right?!?

So what does this mean?!? The first question you have to ask yourself is; Are you vExpert material.  Also along the same token you have to ask “Do I know someone who is vExpert material and I’d like to nominate”   The vExpert Program is still broken down into paths of Evangelist, Customer and Partner so the options are multiple and valuable.   When it comes to providing feedback and being supportive of the community refer to my guide mentioned above for ways to contribute and just continue being awesome!

For those of you applying to be a vExpert this year, good luck and best to you!

So there I was pondering the question, “How can I pull the details of the Permission tab in vCenter without logging into all of my damn vCenters!”

I tossed around a few ideas of commands which didn’t give me what I wanted. I searched and found some really awesome scripts by @LucD22 and others which were awesome if I wanted to view the rights assigned to roles, assign rights to those roles, and import them respectively.  But my objective was far more simpler than that.   I wanted a very easy way to dump what Role is tied to which User accounts across my hundreds of vCenters in a simple fashion.

Lo and behold, here is the base result!

Get-VIPermission | Select Role, Principal, Entity, UID

Wow that was easy! but wait! WTF WHY DOES UID KEEP TRUNCATING! Hey, calm down, calm down… I have a fix for that. ;)   Also in that same fix, I really cared specifically who was granted the Administrative type roles, less so caring about Virtual Machine User, or Power User.  Thus the following two modifications took care of that.

Get-VIPermission | Where {$_.Role –eq “Admin”} | Select Role, Principal, Entity, UID | Export-CSV “C:\Temp\Rights.csv”

And there it went! Dumping all of the data I wanted into a CSV file which I could sort and manipulate unflustered and unfettered by the results!

What was really useful about this, is unlike just looking at the top level permissions tab, this will also drill down into sub-objects whereby I was able to find accts which were granted permission on a sub-part!   Hopefully this helps you as much as it helped me in discovering and respectively writing this :)

I’ll probably come back and revisit this script on a quarterly basis making sure no-one went rogue in the meantime. You should too. :)