What is the point of all this software-defined infrastructure if you don't use it? In prior examples, it's a fairly straightforward path to SDN when deploying NSX Data Center, allowing a VI admin or network engineer to deploy virtual network resources via a GUI. This isn't the end of an effort, but the start of a …

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Have you ever wondered what happened to all the privately-addressed traffic coming from any home network? Well, if it isn't explicitly blocked by the business, it's routed, and this is not good. Imagine what data leakage can occur when a user mistypes a destination IP - the traffic goes out to the Service Provider, who …

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GitOps GitOps, a term coined in 2017, describes the practice of performing infrastructure operations from a Git repository. In this practice, we easily develop the ability to re-deploy any broken infrastructure (like application managers), but that doesn't really help infrastructure engineers. From the perspective of …

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Idempotence and Declarative Methods - not just buzzwords Idempotence Coined by Benjamin Peirce, this term indicates that a mathematical operation will produce a consistent result, even with repetition. Idempotence is much more complicated subject in mathematics and computer science. IT and DevOps use a simplified …

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**Note: This feature has been deprecated by VMware The Jetstreams Cloud operators now provide two completely different classes of service to customers: Self-Service, VMs, Operating System Templates Generally mature, some private cloud operators are smoothing out CMPs or such, but work as intended from a customer …

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Note: This feature has been deprecated by VMware NSX-T 3.2 has been released, and has a ton of spiffy features. The NSX ALB integration is particularly neat, but while repeatedly (repeatably) breaking the integration to learn more about it, I ran into this error: When deploying NSX ALB appliances from the NSX Manager, …

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Have you seen this selector when building machines on vSphere? This causes some fairly common issues in NOS VMs, as most don't really know what distribution the NOS is based on. "Guest OS Version" doesn't just categorize your workload, though. Selecting "Other Linux" instructs vSphere to maximize …

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Why should an infrastructure engineer leverage REST APIs? I'm sure most IT workers have at least heard of REST APIs, or heard a sales pitch where a vendor insists that while a requested functionality doesn't exist, you could build it yourself by "using the API". Or, participate in discussions where people …

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Have you ever seen this error before? This is a really important issue in enterprise infrastructure because unauthenticated TLS connections teach our end users to be complacent and ignore this error. TLS Authentication SSL/TLS for internal enterprise administration typically only addresses the confidentiality aspects …

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Cryptographic security is an important aspect of hosting any business-critical service. When hosting a public service secured by TLS, it is important to strike a balance between compatibility (The Availability aspect of CIA), and strong cryptography (the Integrity or Authentication and Confidentiality aspects of CIA). …

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