DevOps

  • Ansible Docker Container Management Playbooks

    Ansible can be used to manage your Docker container environment and other infrastructure. Let’s see how that can be done. Table of contentsWhat is Docker?What is Ansible?Playbooks to install packagesDocker build with AnsibleDocker Installation TasksAdding Docker Image to playbooksRunning Ansible…

  • Terraform remote-exec provisioners

    Terraform remote exec provisioner to run shell commands

    If you are delving into using Terraform in your production or home lab environment, it is a great way to automate your infrastructure, either in a private cloud or public cloud environment. The Terraform provisioner block allows running commands on…

  • Choosing the Best VMware Automation Tools

    Providing streamlined and consistent management across the virtual estate is extremely important when using enterprise virtualization servers to run virtual machines in the enterprise data center. Managing a vSphere environment can require performing many different management tasks that are tedious…

  • Enabling the unattended upgrades for your Ubuntu server

    Apt Periodic Autoclean Interval with Unattended-Upgrades

    If you have a number of Linux servers in your environment, whether these are in production environments or in the home lab, you want to keep your Linux servers up-to-date with security patches across the board. Manually logging in and…

  • Running the packer build with the new HCL2 files in place

    Convert Packer Variables JSON to HCL2 for automated vSphere templates

    One of the tasks I have been working on lately is getting my Packer vSphere build templates converted over from JSON to the new preferred HCL2 language as of Packer 1.7.2. This is the preferred language to write your Packer…

  • Terraform prompt for variable input during a virtual machine clone operation

    Terraform prompt for variable input when creating a virtual machine

    Terraform is a great infrastructure as code scripting language from Hashicorp. I use it day in and day out in the lab and in production environments to streamline the process of deploying infrastructure. In the lab environment, I have had…

  • Running packer build Ubuntu 22.04

    Packer Build Ubuntu 22.04 for VMware vSphere

    Yesterday, Ubuntu released the latest in the line of LTS versions of Ubuntu Server and Workstation. Ubuntu 22.04 is a great release featuring many new features and enhancements to the Ubuntu family of operating systems. If you are like me,…

  • Download the Jira Core installation

    JIRA Upgrade JIRA Core Self-managed Server

    Most of you are no strangers to JIRA. It is arguably the most popular Agile project management solution adopted worldwide. Like most companies, Atlassian is pushing everyone to the cloud. The self-managed JIRA Server offering is deprecated and will no…

  • Decrypting the password using the key file

    Terraform AWS Windows Instance Code

    Most of the time, if you are like me, you use Terraform to configure Linux EC2 instances for provisioning in AWS. However, you may have the need for Terraform AWS Windows instance code. In this simple walkthrough, I will show…

  • Official logo of the VMware Event Broker Appliance

    VMware Event Broker Appliance VEBA tutorial: How to create an email notification

    Among the really cool projects I have stood up in the lab as of recently is the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA). If you have not heard about VEBA and you are looking to take your vCenter notifications and automation…