I'm pretty excited to release this and make one long blog post out of it. This is not my usual blog posting topic, but this is a good place to keep it so I can maintain it. I'm a pretty big halloween nut, like really big. check out some pictures from 2012 Halloween.

Last year, I caught wind of the MonsterShield prop controller. For about $200, you can have a prop controller that can control 16 relays, have 15 different animations, with MP3 cd quality audio, that also has an API. I was completely sold. Over some talk with Jason (the creator of the MonsterShield), I wanted to build something that I could use to trigger the animations that I want. I run a yard haunt, and with over 10,000+ people that come around to see the Halloween decorations on the street, I can't use traditional triggers. Motion detectors means they would be going off constantly. And having it timed means I won't have the correct animations set off for specific parts of the yard depending upon where people are standing. I could use multiple prop controllers, but I like centralization. With 16 relays, I can control everything in my yard from a single spot, so I had to figure out the best possible way to trigger the animations I want to see. This way my wife and I can sit on the porch, drink a beer, and set off the electric chair when people aren't ready for it.

I started learning Ruby on Rails earlier this year but didn't have a project, so this became my first go at Ruby on Rails. And thanks to Steven Bryen for lending his ruby expertise from time to time. The great thing about RoR is that you can easily build responsive websites that can be viewed on mobile phones, tablets, as well as desktops. So there is my goal. Using a Raspberry Pi as the Ruby on Rails server, it will send commands to the Arduino to trigger anything I want.

Without further ado, I am pleased to introduce the MonsterRemote. The MonsterRemote is aimed at being a remote control for the MonsterShield prop controller that you can use from any mobile device. Utilizing a smartphone with web browsing capabilities, you can trigger any configured animation on the MonsterShield prop controller. This is a free and open source project with no liability or support.

Features:

• Dynamic Home Screen that will only display the animations/slots that have been enabled on the MonsterShield
• Change the generic names ("0. Scene 00") to any name of your choosing like "0. Ambient Mix" or "0. Scary Jumping Flying Thing"
• Enable/Disable Animations in the settings page that will Enable/Disable the slot on the MonsterShield and reflect a new or deleted button on the home screen
• Interrupt and stop a triggered animation after selecting yes on a dialogue box
• Remotely Shutdown your Raspberry Pi to preserve file integrity of the linux system files
• Toggle Ambient settings to be On or Off
• Toggle the Animation mode to be Sequential (0,1,2,3..), Random (5,A,9,1..), or Single after selecting your animation(1,1,1,1..)
• It's FREE!!

Browse the code over at GitHub - monster_remote.

An intro video (bad quality on the Flip) and some screenshots:

Just like a 2010 Mercedes SL550 being crashed into a wall, the parts are being scrapped and re-purposed into other applications. I knew this was a speculated announcement coming up at VMworld, but kept heads down until I heard it was true.

Yesterday, there was an article detailing all of this information by Beth Pariseau from TechTarget that detailed everything extremely well, VMware splits vCloud Director into vCenter, vCloud Automation Center.

EDIT:: 9/3/13... vCloud Director will still be available as a service provider offering. There will be a special version of vCD for service providers that is not correctly stated in the article but the plan to split the code functions between vCAC and vCenter is correct.

EDIT:: 9/4/13... OFFICIAL Statements have been released. Please read these two articles:

• vCloud Director Convergence and Transition Plan – What’s the Scoop?
• End of Availability and End of Support Life for VMware vCloud Director 5.1 Standalone (2057589)

SUMMARY:

As a result of this announcement, VMware is making the following recommendations:

ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS –  VMware recommends that customers use the combination of vCloud Automation Center and the vSphere platform to support their private cloud architectures and use cases. vCD 5.5 is available starting in Q3 if required to support use cases not currently covered by vCAC. Projects already in-flight with vCD should also remain in place as vCD 5.5 support will be extended beyond its normally 2-year window (out to 2017).

SERVICE PROVIDERS – vCD will continue to be available through the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) in the cloud bundle and is still the recommended solution for service providers. VMware will continue on-going  development for vCD to meet the specific needs of service providers and will provide further details at a later date.

EDIT:: 9/9/13... Another Official Blog Release Reports of vCloud Director’s death exaggerated

Summary: 

1) Development of vCloud Director continues at VMware, now 100% focused on the cloud service provider market.

2) vCloud Director will continue to be available in the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) and also continues to be a foundational component of vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware’s IaaS offering.

3) The next release of vCloud Director will be version 5.6, in the first half of 2014, available through VSPP to cloud service providers.

4) VMware continues to develop and enhance the vCloud API, to provide API access to new capabilities, and to make the API faster and easier to use.

Here are my thoughts. While I enjoyed working with vCloud Director, I can't say that enough of the clients were fond it. The UI itself just wasn't sexy enough to get mainstream attention and the storefront for ordering out of a catalog wasn't stupid simple. It will be a matter of time that vCloud Director users will have to make the jump (once again).

The VMworldTV crew must have been hard at work and you can watch some keynotes and sessions on YouTube. Most of these sessions cover the broad spectrum of everything that was announced. Check them out

VMworld 2013: General Session - Tuesday, August 27th

Today, you are probably going to see a lot of discussion around the completely re-vamped vSphere 5.5 Single Sign On (SSO) experience. Most blogs will get very lengthy and technical, I'm going to do the exact opposite. So you've heard the announcement, now here's the 30,000 foot summary.

What's New with vCenter Single Sign-On 5.5 (the short short version)

• Improved Architecture
• Multi-master
• Built-in replication
• Site awareness
• Database
• There is no database!!!
• Installation
• One deployment model for all scenarios. Select one of the following:
• vCenter SSO for first or only vCenter server
• vCenter SSO for an additional vCenter server in the same site
• vCenter SSO for an additional vCenter server in a new site (multi-site)
• Diagnostics
• Full suite of diagnostics and troubleshooting tools

It's that time of the year again. VMworld 2013 is upon us and by the looks of my twitter stream, everyone is making their way to SFO. I know I haven't had a chance to meet many of my followers and I'm hoping to extend that network further this year. If you see me, lets make an effort to connect, and not just on LinkedIn or Twitter. If i'm not working the booth, then I'm probably wearing a pair of rainbow sandals.

This year you won't catch me at a single session. I've got a Solutions Exchange only pass, so that means you know where you will find me. So here's my schedule of things I will have a presence. I will also be in the hang space instead of going back and forth to my hotel. So you will find me there or I'll be looking for cool new products on the show floor. Usually those small booth in the very far back have some great tech you should check out:

Saturday:

4:14pm: Arrive to SFO. Catch BART to the hotel, then go out and buy a black belt. I have no idea what happened to my good black belt, so I've got some last minute shopping to do.

7:00pm and on: I may be at vBeers. Not sure, but there is definitely going to be dinner happening somewhere.

Sunday:

9:00am: vBreakfast at Mel's Drive-In.

3:30pm - 7:30pm: VCE Booth Duty. Come and hang out. There's going to be a lot of booth duty happening.

8:00pm: VMunderground

I'm actually really excited about this. I've spent a lot of hours building this tool and (about a YEAR AND HALF LATER!) I'm finally able to share it.

This project started off about 1.5 to 2 years ago after talking to Justin Guidroz (@jguidroz) who was a rockstar VCE architect at the time (now over at VMware). Everytime someone had to give their customer a visio diagram of their purchased Vblock, it was a mess. There was no standardization, and the time it took to make a visio could easily consume an entire week consisting of reading platform engineering diagrams, waiting for email responses, and finding all the right stencils. After about 3 weeks of building and testing different layered PDFs, I had Justin do the QA work and we had version 1.0. It was great because many internal employees got major use out of it.

In February of this year, VCE had a VCE Mega Launch Technical Details for 2/21 Product Announcements. This meant that all the work in the 1.0 version had to be updated. There was no longer a "standard configuration". There was more flexibility in the design and I had to re-work the tool to make it fit. I completely re-vamped the tool, made version 2.0, and blasted it out company wide. At this point, there were about 1,000 new employees that came onboard between the release of the 1.0 and 2.0 versions. It only took about 45 minutes until I got emails and phone calls from Legal and Marketing. Since both of these parties had no idea of the existence of these tools, I had meetings upon meetings. They needed to understand what the point of this tool was, and why it never had any approvals. Fast forward 2 months, and I had all the approvals I needed to allow access. But now I needed to go through the web teams to get it posted, and as of yesterday, that day arrived!

I'm beginning my world diving into ruby and rails development. I'm 2 days into it and I'm liking it so far. I'm finally understanding what people are talking about when it comes to github, forking, heroku, and more. So why am I building this post?

Well I had some trouble getting started with Aptana, sqlite3, and heroku. When you start pushing packages into heroku, it doesn't like sqlite3. Sqlite3 is what is used out of the box when creating a standard Rails project and works well for what it does. However, heroku doesn't use sqlite3 and will fail on every upload because your app isn't using PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is a much more resilient database with more features that should be used over sqlite3 on any "production" application.  So the first goal was to make any new Ruby on Rails project use PostgreSQL using Aptana. The second goal, was to make sure I had PostgreSQL setup correctly. Of course, step 2 needs to be done before step 1.

If you follow this guide, it will save you the few hours of time it took me to get this working correctly. I'm using a mac so take that for what it is. Railscasts #342 Migrating to PostgreSQL was a great starting point for me and deserves a majority of the thanks.

Internally within my company, there is usually a lot of discussion about how a customer goes about managing multiple vCenter servers. With the vSphere 5.1 addition of Single Sign-On (SSO), it dramatically complicates the design itself. This topic won't mean much for SMBs because you should be pretty well off with a single vCenter and SSO instance. This is primarily going to be focused on large enterprise designs.

WARNING::: these are MY design considerations and recommendations, use at your own risk. All depicted diagrams do not represent the entirety of a solution. many components are probably missing, so use your imagination.

In the olden days, multiple vCenter environments and geographically dispersed sites could easily be seen in a single vSphere Client view by configuring them in Linked Mode. Linked Mode is great for having fewer panes of management. There are a lot of cons with this route as well:

• A degradation hit in your scalability. (as of vCenter 5.1)
  
  • Maximum of 3000 hosts
  • Maximum of 30,000 powered on VMs
  • Maximum of 50,000 registered VMs
• Upgrading one site may bring another offline because of build or version incompatibilities
• Time synchronization is critical (but this should usually be critical in any production application)

Now why isn't vCenter Linked Mode a good route for continuing down this path? The addition of 5.1's SSO brings in a critical requirement: Make sure that all vCenter Servers in a Linked Mode group are registered to the same vCenter Single Sign On server. Read more at Linked Mode Prerequisites for vCenter Server