Matthew Kimler

Ansible Tower Demo

October 30, 2018 by Matthew KimlerNo Comments

I mentioned in my recent NetApp Insight post that we created an Ansible Tower demo to show off at Insight this year. The Tower demo took the playbooks we created for Ansible Engine to spin up EC2 instances in AWS and clone a volume hosted on Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and with some slight tweaking, adjusted them to work in Ansible Tower as a Workflow. Like before, I wanted to record this demo so that others could see how the whole process worked. Because Tower is more a repo friendly solution for environments, we also created a GitHub repo for both the Ansible Engine playbooks and the Ansible Tower playbooks. They are slightly different, mostly because of how inventories are handled in Tower vs Engine. Additionally, there are some differences in how we handle variables and pass them from one playbook to another. I hope this demo is helpful for others to get going on their Ansible journey. If you want to check...

NetApp Insight 2018 – IAS Update and Demos

October 12, 2018October 30, 2018 by Matthew KimlerNo Comments

Hey everyone. I hope you're all doing well as always. NetApp Insight 2018 was last week and for the first time, I was able to attend. There was some concern that my wife might go into labor while I was gone, but the little one was nice enough to hang out through the conference. With that said, let's review some of the IAS stuff we did at Insight. IAS had a speaking session on Tuesday that had a solid turnout from attendees. The focus was on our updated Ansible demo that shows Ansible working its magic on EC2 instances and NetApp Cloud ONTAP. Shawn Hamby also did a great overview of Cloud Volume Service and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and the benefits of each. We also showed a little demo on Ansible Tower and how the entire set of playbooks we had already done in Ansible Engine could be combined into a single Tower Workflow. I think attendees were pleased that the session...

Ansible Demo v2 – Scaling to AWS EC2 using Red Hat Ansible and Leveraging NetApp Cloud ONTAP

October 12, 2018October 30, 2018 by Matthew KimlerNo Comments

Hey folks. I hope everyone is doing well. A real quick update on the Ansible Demo that we build several months ago for Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. The original demo was build mostly using the RAW module because at the time of the creation of the demo, NetApp had not yet published modules that would be relevant to the demo. However, that's all changed over the past few months and now NetApp has more Ansible modules than any other storage vendor. Hats off to David Blackburn and his team for working on it and keeping the updates rolling. With all of the changes, we decided to make a version two of the Ansible demo to showcase more NetApp modules than RAW commands. We still cannot completely move away from RAW commands as things, like collecting ONTAP version information and setting a Junction Path during a clone operation, are just not 100% available yet via a module. But at least we...

NetApp Virtual Storage Console – Migrating to a New Server

June 27, 2018 by Matthew KimlerNo Comments

I ran into this with a customer this week and felt it was a good note to point out for those that are migrating customers or themselves to a new version of vCenter. In this particular case, the customer was upgrading from vCenter 5.1 to 6.5 through another 5.5 upgrade, and additionally was going to migrate from the Windows-based vCenter to the VCSA. Like many NetApp customers that have been using NetApp as their datastore storage platform, the customer had the Virtual Storage Console (VSC) plugin for vCenter setup and running many backup jobs. The VSC software is installed on a Windows server and typically, customers that were running vCenter on Windows also installed the VSC on the same Windows server. This is fine except when the upgrade path will take the customer from the Windows-based vCenter to the appliance, where the vCenter migration will shut down the existing vCenter to make use of the original IP address and FQDN. In...

Family Update

June 5, 2018June 5, 2018 by Matthew KimlerNo Comments

It's been a while since I posted something about the family. That's because it's been an extremely busy year thus far and I have neglected to post on the blog. But let's give a quick update. Jameson is getting so big and really moving around now. Weighing in at just over 25 pounds, he's starting to pick up new talents like throwing balls and moving around on his own feet while sitting in his little car or on his construction truck. It's still a wonder to see how humans advance over time. Just when you think things are moving slowly, it suddenly jumps into fast mode with several new things happening at once. He also cut a new tooth and we feel there's probably a few others coming in. You have to feel bad for them when they can't express themselves verbally and there is something going on that's probably painful. It breaks your heart in a way but you know they'll...

Red Hat Summit 2018 – Ansible Demo with NetApp Cloud Manager – Part Two – The Playbooks

June 5, 2018 by Matthew KimlerNo Comments

It was asked to have the playbooks shared with the community from the Ansible demo that was presented at the Red Hat Summit. Down below, I have each of the playbooks posted for anyone to take a look at and review. Please note that since this was my first time messing around with Ansible, there are most likely cleaner ways to do some of these activities, but these worked for our demo and should be a good starting point for others that want to try it out. Each playbook was broken into sections, but there's no reason that you could not put all of these into a single playbook. With that said, here you go! Playbook #1 - Basic Provisioning of EC2 instances in AWS. --- # Basic provisioning of EC2 instances. - name: Create AWS resources hosts: localhost connection: local gather_facts: False tasks: - name: Create an EC2 instance ec2: aws_access_key:...

Red Hat Summit 2018 – Ansible Demo with NetApp Cloud Manager

May 22, 2018 by Matthew Kimler2 Comments

It's been a long time, so first apologies for being out of pocket for some time. It's been a very busy past few months with work and family. However, I'm back and I wanted to start off with a video demo that I created for the Red Hat 2018 Summit in San Francisco in May. At the conference, IAS decided to get a booth to meet with Red Hat customers and represent both Red Hat and NetApp. We decided that the best way to show off our experience with the two partners was to create a simple demonstration that might be of interest to attendees. Robert Nelson, another IAS engineer, and I put something together that we're both proud of. We chose to make a demo of how Ansible could be used to automate the deployment of Amazon EC2 instances, make some modifications, and then leverage a NetApp AWS instance to use our once on-premise data and use it on our...

vRealize Business for Cloud – Lost EC2 Instances?

December 13, 2017 by Matthew KimlerNo Comments

This one is going to be short and sweet, at least it was to me. I upgraded my vRealize Automation environment in our IAS lab to version 7.3. I had a few hiccups because of an old IaaS node that had been replaced and never cleaned up (which you can read about in my other post this week), but other than it was pretty smooth. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the vRealize Business for Cloud to 7.3 to keep everything the same version, as a good engineer would. :) There were quite a few updates to vRB this time around, and those familiar with vRB will noticed the significant changes to the UI layout and reporting. A lot of the plumbing is similar when you start to drill down into things, but some new information is now available for customers. I'm not going to go through all of the new features in this post, but if you want to read...

vRealize Automation – Removing an IaaS Node

December 12, 2017December 12, 2017 by Matthew KimlerNo Comments

Recently in my lab, I was frustrated over an attempted upgrade to version 7.3 from version 7.2 of vRealize Automation. It had been a while since I had last used my vRA deployment, so I naturally assumed I was probably bound for some sort of issue due to neglect. However, typically I can figure these things out pretty quickly and go along my way. This time was different and the solution, was frankly disappointing. Perhaps a lack of understanding on my part, but I think it was more of a lack of documentation from VMware on vRealize Automation. When I attempted to upgrade the vRA appliance to 7.3, I received an error in the Upgrade panel stating the following: The VMware certificate was not installed on the nodes listed below. Make sure the Management Agent is up and running on them and that it has connectivity to the VA. It then displayed a single IaaS server from my lab. When I took a...

A Circle in a Round Hole

December 7, 2017 by Matthew Kimler Comment Closed

I'm pretty sure that the title is confusing, but Jameson's education is always fascinating to me. Several months ago, we purchased various Fisher-Price toys, either that has educational or fun value. At this age, I'm pretty sure it's a bit of both because learning is fun when everything is just new and colorful. One of the toys we purchased is a pretty typical shapes blocks game. I'm guessing we bought this when he was about six months old. In a typical fashion, the goal for him at that stage was to just pick them up and drop them and really had nothing to do with putting something in a hole. In fact, the main goal was not to put anything in the bucket. But as months progressed, this simple game changed a lot. First it was keep the blocks out of the bucket and toss the yellow top. Next, the goal was to toss the blocks behind him, but he enjoyed when...