Posts 129

2026

2 Posts

• July — Grafana PLAG Starter Kit
• April — Idempotently Manage Ubiquiti Unifi resources with Ansible

2025

3 Posts

• December — Starting an IaC Repository with GitHub and Terraform
• December — Automate Netbox Inventory Ingestion with Diode
• November — Visualize and Report Ansible with OpenTelemetry and Syslog

2024

5 Posts

• November — Automate DNS Zone Generation and Deployment with Ansible and Netbox
• August — VM Deployment Pipelines with Proxmox
• May — Starting from scratch with Netbox IPAM
• April — Manage Linux patching with Ansible and Netbox!
• January — Abstracting DNS Record Management with Ansible and Jinja 2

2023

17 Posts

• December — Build and Consume Alpine Linux vSphere Images
• November — Apollo 13 "Failure is not an option", and how non-engineers misinterpret it
• October — Internet Load Balancing with pfSense
• September — Handoff to Day-N Automation with vSphere Content Libraries and Netbox
• August — Circumventing Coders block and starting a new project
• July — Why wait? Eventual Consistency and Reliability
• July — Python Virtual Environment Setup in Jenkins
• June — Mellanox `nmlx5_core` driver `4.23` issues on ESXi 8.0 Update 1
• June — API Conversations and Why They are Important
• April — Escape Platos Cave to build better IT infrastructure
• March — Automate Cisco IOS/IOS-XE documentation with Ansible (with examples)
• March — Document Networks as Code with D2!
• March — Document vSphere as Code with D2!
• March — Diagram as Code with D2!
• February — Enable ToFU (Trust on First Use) with OpenSSH
• February — Deploy vSphere VMs with Ansible!
• January — Why Automate VM Deployment with vSphere's REST API

2022

28 Posts

• December — What happens to packets with a VMware vSphere Distributed Switch?
• December — Security patches are available for VMware vCenter 8.0 - Let's try the new vCenter Lifecycle Manager!
• December — Why Automate Programmability is about solving new problems without fear of failure.
• November — Tweak Application behaviors with NSX ALB
• October — Track Certificate Expiration with Jenkins and Python 3!
• October — Gathering and Using Data from Cisco NX-OS with Ansible Modules
• September — Using cloud-init with vSphere and openSUSE 15.4
• August — Identity theft has gotten out of hand. Here are basic ways to protect yourself.
• August — NSX Data Center 4.0.0.1 is now available!
• July — The Role of Trust and Failure in Information Security
• June — Blog Post 1
• May — Scale datacenters past the number of VLAN IDs with NSX-T Tier-0 and Q-in-X
• May — News Post 1
• May — Different Methods to carry 802.1q tags with VMware vDS and NSX-T
• April — Network Experiments with VMware NSX-T and Cisco Modeling Labs
• April — News Post 2
• April — Vendor interoperability with multiple STP instances
• March — Cisco Modeling Labs
• March — Deploy Root Certificates to Debian-based Linux systems with Ansible
• March — News Post 7
• March — News Post 6
• March — News Post 5
• March — News Post 4
• March — Cloud-Scale Networking: NSX Datacenter Hierarchical Tier-0s, blending telecom with cloud
• March — VMware NSX-T and Ansible
• January — Bogons, and how to leverage public IP feeds with NSX-T
• January — GitOps with NSX Advanced Load Balancer and Jenkins
• January — Leverage Idempotent, Declarative Profiles with the NSX-ALB (Avi) REST API

2021

33 Posts

• December — The winds of change in cloud operations, and why integrations like NSX Data Center 3.2 + Advanced Load Balancer are important
• December — NSX-T 3.2 and NSX ALB (Avi) Deployment Error - "Controller is not reachable. {0}"
• December — News Post 3
• December — Blog Post 7
• December — Blog Post 6
• December — Blog Post 5
• December — Blog Post 4
• December — Blog Post 3
• December — Blog Post 2
• December — VyOS and other Linux builds unable to use `vmxnet3` or "VMware Paravirtual SCSI" adapter on vSphere
• November — Why Automate Reliability Approaches with the VMware NSX-T API
• October — Get rid of certificate errors with Avi (NSX-ALB) and Hashicorp Vault!
• September — Get an A on ssllabs.com with VMware Avi / NSX ALB (and keep it that way with SemVer!)
• September — Static IPv4/IPv6 Addresses - Debian 11
• September — VMware NSX ALB (Avi Networks) and NSX-T Integration, Installation
• September — vCenter - File system `/storage/log` is low on storage space
• August — VMworld 2021 is right around the corner! Here are my top 10 sessions!
• August — Managing DNS Servers with Ansible and Jenkins (Unbound, BIND)
• July — NSX Advanced Load Balancer - NSX-T Service Engine Creation Failures: `CC_SE_CREATION_FAILURE` and `Transport Node Not Found to create service engine`
• June — World WiFi Day 2021!
• June — XML, JSON, YAML - Python data structures and visualization for infrastructure engineers
• May — Troubleshooting with VMware NSX ALB/Avi Vantage
• May — VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer - Installation
• May — Leveraging Hyperglass and NSX-T!
• May — PSA: PAN-OS Drops BGP peers with an invalid NLRI / Always filter inbound prefixes from Avi Vantage
• May — NSX-T Edge Transport Node Packet Captures
• April — PAN-OS IPv6 Error: bgp peer local address 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0 does not belong to interface
• April — VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer - Overview
• March — Design Pattern: Looking Glasses
• March — Unearned Uptime - Present and Future Design Patterns
• March — Unearned Uptime: Letting Old Ideas Go
• January — 9/10 NGINX Use Cases, URI and Host rewrites
• January — NSX-T Transitive Networking

2020

11 Posts

• December — Why Automate Using Pipelines to Develop and Manage Network Configurations
• December — Why Automate Ansible Playbooks and Desired State for Network Operating Systems
• December — Advantages for BGP in Virtualized Topologies
• December — vCenter Upgrade Error: `Exception Occurred in install precheck phase`
• October — Using VM Templates and NSX-T for Repeatable Virtual Network Deployments
• August — Why Automate Writing a self-testing Python class for REST or XML API invocation
• May — Why Automate, Part 2: RESTFul APIs and why they aren't as hard as you think
• March — IPv6 Sage Certification with NSX-T, Part 2
• March — IPv6 Up and Running - Dual-Stack connectivity with NSX-T
• February — IPv6 Sage Certification with NSX-T, Part 1: Requesting an extended prefix
• February — Why Automate, Part 1: Network Config Templating in Jinja2

2019

28 Posts

• December — Securing Dual-Stack (IPv4,IPv6) Endpoints with NSX-T
• November — IPv6 Up and Running - Address Planning Basics and using a Tunnel Broker
• October — Anycast Stateless Services with NSX-T, Implementation
• October — Anycast Stateless Services with NSX-T, the Theory
• October — BGP Graceful Restart, some inter-platform oddities, what to do with it
• October — NSX-T 2.5 Getting Started, Part 2 - Service Configuration!
• September — NSX-T 2.5 Getting Started, Part 1
• September — Spine and Leaf Networks, an Outline
• September — NSX-T Datacenter 2.5 Upgrade Process and Preview
• September — NSX-T Datacenter 2.5 Released!
• June — Spine and Leaf Practical Applications, The IP Portability Problem
• June — Spine and Leaf Practical Applications, EGP and IGP combined!
• June — Spine and Leaf Practical Applications, eBGP
• June — Switching Lab Topology Diagram
• June — Spine and Leaf Practical Applications, OSPF
• June — Spine and Leaf Practical Applications, RIPv2
• May — Spine and Leaf Networks, a Topology
• April — Spine and Leaf Networks, an Introduction
• April — Traditional Datacenter Network, a Preamble to Spine-and-Leaf
• March — Forward Error Correction, a story about Generation 14 PowerEdge and 25 Gigabit connectivity
• March — Gotchas with NSX-T 2.4
• March — Running a serial console server over ESXi
• March — Minemeld installation, continued
• February — Minemeld installation, Part 1
• February — My Home Lab!
• February — RFC 7710
• February — WPA and Open System Authentication
• February — Aruba's early implementation of WPA3, mixed mode