I am honored to have been selected as a VMware vExpert once again for 2021!

Im excited to announce the first release of the Pure Storage Cloud Block Store (CBS) Terraform Provider. The first release introduces support for Cloud Block Store on AWS. Let’s dive in and take a look at how to utilize the new provider!

Welcome to my first blog of 2021! Its been a crazy year so far, but glad to be back writing. This issue is one that has been bothering me for some time in my vSphere 7 environment. Every time I logged into the vSphere Client i got the following error. “Error downloading plug-in. Make sure that the URL is reachable and the registered thumbprint is correct.” I finally had a few moments to research the issue and resolve it.

On November 16, 2020 the latest version of the Pure1 VM Analytics OVA Collector (3.0) was released and with it comes some new Pure1 features! Let’s take a look at how the collector has changed, and what new features we now have within Pure1 VM Analytics.

When deploying any enterprise application it is always important to think about the BC/DR strategy. Containers work really great from a Business Continuity perspective as they are stateless, but what happens if you lose the entire datacenter? What happens if you need to migrate an application to another site? PX-Backup from Portworx by Pure Storage is a great tool for this! Lets take a look how we can backup and restore applications using PX-Backup

Another update to my “Terraforming AWS” series is the ability to deploy a Linux based Instance and connect to an existing data volume sitting on the Pure Cloud Block Store. This post will cover how to setup your environment and deploy and bootstrap your linux instance to connect via ISCSI.

When it comes to monitoring your Pure Storage environment Pure1 is a great place for that. It is also a great place to use your analytic’s data to your advantage and use it for intelligent VMware provisioning! In this blog post I will cover how to use this data to your advantage to make sure you can easily deploy VM’s to the most optimal array and datastore.

Previously, I covered how to Deploy and Bootstrap an EC2 Instance in AWS using Terraform. Not everyone may use Terraform, but quite a few people are using PowerShell today. Lets take a Look at how we can use AWSPowerShell to deploy an EC2 instance in AWS.

As a followup to my previous post on Automating EC2 deployments, I figured why not show how this can also be done with Microsoft Azure? Check out how to launch an Azure VM instance and run some scripts to customize your installation.

As part of demonstrating our products to customers, I tend to reprovision EC2 instances to show how easy it is to mount data in AWS to Cloud Block Store. After doing this manually a little too often, I figured why not automate it? Check out this blog on how I use Terraform to deploy a EC2 instance and configure it for in-guest iSCSI.