Why hello there – it’s been a while – It’s been a busy couple of months with work, conferences and home life and blogging has been put on the back burner for a bit. I mean hey, I live in Canada and I need to get ready for the winter eh! It’s a “Game of Thrones” winter around here! Fear not over the past couple of months I’ve been doing some awesome things with Ravello, with a vSphere 6 upgrade, and some other awesome automation and orchestration stuff so I have a lot of posts filed under the idea category – so there is no lack of content to be written! All that said for now let’s just have a look at some great community posts.
More advantage to the VMUG advantage
VMUG Advantage has many benefits including free NFR software evals, discounted training, certification, and conference fees, discount codes for software and labs and more – but now we can add one more item to that list. As of now VMUG is offering $600 of service credit with vCloud Air OnDemand. I’ve reviewed vCloud Air OnDemand and can say that $600 is more than enough to get you in there and playing around for the year! This is yet another great benefit to the VMUG Advantage program so if you haven’t bought it – do it!
Unexpected Signal: 11
Did you jump to get vSphere 5.5 Update 3 installed and running in your environment? If so you might want to check out this VMware KB which outlines that the snapshot consolidation process may cause your VMs to fail with the above, well descripted, error message 
Sorry, nothing funny about if you are running any backup solution that may utilizing the VADP to free up disks for processing! Anyways, downgrade, power off VMs and consolidate, or redeploy 5.5 are your resolution options for now!
Linux Networking through vRO
If you love vRO and automation and you don’t follow the vCOTeam blog then you should, do that first before continuing any further. There, now that that’s out of the way have a look at this very detailed post in regards to configuring networking with Linux using nmcli, or better yet doing the whole thing through a vRO workflow – Awesome stuff!
All Flash VSAN in the homelab
Jason Langer (@jaslanger) has a great article about spinning (err flashing) up an All Flash VSAN setup in his homelab – showing you both the hard and the easy way this is a great guide for those looking to test out AF VSAN in their spare time (you know, when you aren’t building lego and what not )
Rubrik and vRealize Orchestrator
Well, if you are a Rubrik customer and you are a vRO lover then I suggest you head over to Eric Shanks’ blog as he (and Nick Colyer) has a slew of blog posts related to vRO and Rubrik and how to do just about anything utilizing the API’s that Rubrik provides.
Speaking of backup – Altaro is now on the scene
There’s a new player in the backup space when looking at protecting VMware virtual machines! I had a chance to sit on the beta for the Altaro VMware backup and albeit I didn’t have a lot of time to check it all out I did get it installed and configured some backups and liked what I saw! There have been a lot of community reviews of their software and first impressions are very positive – anyways, all the data protection junkies can check them out here.
