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Feb
27thVMware & Puppet : One More Step ForwardI wake up everyday committed to not doing things the same old way. That is why my title has that funny word ‘Automation’ in it. I am tasked with finding a way to make what is fragile, expensive, risky, and complex; easier to manage. While most of what I am working on at VMware is not ready for the light of day. There are some things that have come out of our work that would have a greater benefit being in the public space. If you are even an infrequent reader of this blog (which given my posts lately, is everyone) you know that I am a huge fan of PuppetLabs. More than that I am a huge fan of automation using DevOps-style toolsets enabled by community development. Right now I belong to an amazing team of crazy talented engineers. I rarely go a week without seeing something that makes me wish I was capable of doing a backflip. I am proud to announce that today some of that magic is now being put in a place for everyone. Today VMware and PuppetLabs are releasing the first set of modules for managing VMware environments. This brings a bunch of new features for the first time: Management for the vCenter Appliance /w Complete initialization – Just point as a VM that was deployed from the OVF and it will standup vCenter. Datacenter and Cluster configuration – HA, DRS, and more. The one caveat being EVC (but coming soon) ESXi Host – [...]
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Feb
1stStuff to see : Puppet, PEX, and moreI know it has been a while since i have posted. I have been deeply engrossed in my work here at VMware and hopefully will have some extremely cool things to show for it later this year. But I am coming out of the basement for a couple of cool things in the month of February. First I will be doing the keynote for the Toronto VMUG next week. Go here to register and view the great sessions and more that will be available. I will be presenting on Cloud + Automation and giving my perspective on why this is such an awesome time to be diving into automation. I am also going to be co-presenting a session at VMware Partner Exchange 2013 alongside Nigel Kersten (CTO PuppetLabs) on some exciting new stuff from VMware and PuppetLabs. This is a must-attend session as we will be presenting some extremely cool never-before-seen stuff with a live demo . The session info is: ‘VPN1298 – Next Round of Cloud Configuration Automation Using Puppet and VMware’ and it takes place at 2pm on Wednesday. I also have some forthcoming stuff for the community as a whole in the next couple months around some code my team and I have been working on. This year is going to be a busy one for VMware cloud and automation. .nick
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Oct
30thNext Level : 5 Rules for a Rookie Tech Leader:
At this point in my career something weird has happened. People look at me expecting me to answer questions. They expect me to hack my way through the jungle of technology and find a path to business value. They expect me to lead. Or in other words: at sometime in the recent past, I transferred from a contributor – to a leader. But, I am not an executive or a PhD. I am not a battle hardened veteran of a dozen product launches. I am not on any boards, I have not written any books, and I do not walk into a room with every single person knowing my name. What I have done is build a reputation for executing where it is difficult. I have demonstrated my passion for technology and my love for problem solving. I have shown that I love talk to people about tech as much as building tech. And through all this I find myself in an interesting position. There is more riding on my shoulders than ever before. But more than that; there are really good, hard working, and intelligent people that are looking to me to help them achieve success. Which means I can now fail more than just my family or myself. Which is a much more serious place to be. Out of this I have been trying to ensure that I am not just the Special Forces style engineer. I do not just drop in, kill all the problems, and then [...]
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Oct
22ndHello Again : My life up to this point
This post is a catch-up for all the stuff I should have written about but didn’t in the last few weeks. For those that don’t know, I recently moved from EMC over to VMware into a brand new kind of role. Right now I am caught in the trifecta of learning a new company, meeting new teams, and trying to help bootstrap my own with recruiting and design work. Which results in my blog getting a lack of attention. But, all that is going to change. My new mission with this blog is to just start dumping from my brain a combination of what I am playing with and what I have discovered along the way. I am working on tools and special things for the cloud community at large. But these will take a bit of time to see the light of day. So my new post will be titled: “Nick’s Distractions” – and will be a summary of mildly interesting topics that distracted me somehow during my week. So here is my first catch-up: Project Razor: Razor has exploded way bigger than I expected. Funny how solving personal problems can result in public acceptance. The current forks are over 50+ and watchers are almost 200 on the github repo(https://github.com/puppetlabs/Razor). This is just awesome, as I had always envisioned Razor as being truly powerful when it becomes a part of an open community that contributes 99.99% of the code and design. Now for the updates: 1. I was lucky [...]
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Sep
13thChange of pace : My next career experiment
Every year I get a little older and a little wiser. And the one thing I am realizing about myself is that I thrive on challenges. My natural element is breaking problems down and creating answers. I live for that first 5 minutes after success when you can look back and see a pattern of effort paying off. Which is why I look back at my time at EMC and feel so good about what has happened. I have made a great many friends. I have worked with people that have influenced me greatly. I have made my small dent in the technology world where I could. And beyond all that I have had a blast doing it all. And it would be very easy to stay comfortable and contribute where I am. But, I have been presented with an opportunity to move the ball in a way I have not before. Life is a sequence of opportunities, challenges, and empty-time in between. It is how you handle each of those moments over a long period of time that shapes who you become. This new change for me is both a major challenge and an extremely important opportunity to shape who I become. Which is why I am announcing that I have accepted a position with VMware as an Automation Architect in Cloud Infrastructure and Services. This position presents some very unique challenges and I am joining an amazing team of rockstars. I have very specific challenges in this role [...]
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Jun
25thRazor OSS #2 : Public Release of MK
Shortly after the open-source release of Razor in late May, we started to see requests from users for more information about the Microkernel that is used by Razor. What distribution was used as the basis for this Microkernel? What services does it provide? What is involved in building a custom Microkernel that will support my hardware? Will the Microkernel be open-sourced as well? If so, will it be part of the Razor project or a separate (but related) project? At the same time that these requests started coming in from the Razor community, we saw our first Razor issue that was directly linked to the Razor Microkernel. The issue was with support for a networking card that we hadn’t seen before (the Broadcom NetXtreme II card) that was presenting some issues for a Razor user (The Microkernel it wasn’t checking in with the Razor server on machines that used this network card because the it couldn’t connect to the underlying network). In the end, the issue turned out to be that the firmware needed to support this network card was not included in the Microkernel (even though firmware for this card that would work with our Microkernel was readily available). Our intention all along was to make this project publically available, but we still hadn’t worked out the last remaining issues around automating the build of a Microkernel ISO from the Razor Microkernel project itself (at the time of the Razor release late last month the process of building a [...]
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