Kendrick Coleman dot com

How to setup your Mac with VMware Fusion, Vagrant, and boot2docker

Yesterday I had some fun getting Vagrant + boot2docker working on my mac with VMware Fusion. It really wasn't all that hard but some people have had some issues so I'll document my steps. I chose to use VMware Fusion instead of VirtualBox for Vagrant because I don't need 2 products that essentially do the same thing. At the same time, Fusion has reported better consistency with experience and performance time and time again.

1. Install Vagrant

Go to the Vagrant Website downloads and install the vagrant package. That should have been relatively simple

2. Create a Vagrant directory

I created a Vagrant directory under my Documents folder. /Users/kcoleman/Documents/Vagrant
You will use this directory to place vagrant files

OSCON 2014 Day 2 - Go & Continuous Delivery Tutorials

Back again with another update. Day two started off strong. It was tough to choose, but I opted to do Getting Started with Go and Continuous Delivery. There were definitely some other cool tutorials I wish I could have done such as Zero to Cloud with @NetflixOSS.

A cool free e-book to download OSCON 2014 speaker interviews

Eagerly awaiting another year of open source wonders, the Opensource.com community caught up with a handful of notable OSCON speakers to gather behind-the-scenes stories about their passions for open source. This book collects the interviews we conducted.

On to becoming a Gopher.

Steve Francia of MongoDB talked about his origin and how he began using Go and his baby is Hugo -> http://hugo.spf13.com/. The slides and tutorial are all online and you can do everything at your own pace. This was an awesome session and Steve did a fantastic job explaining *why* we need Go, the problems it solves, and how to build our first application. If you do follow along with these slides, it could take you anywhere from 2-8 hours to do it. It's 250 slides and it was ALOT to take in. Everyone works at a different pace. Me, I was SLOWWWWW. I had GoClipse installed. I spent the first 15 minutes trying to get Go working correctly there. One of the guys from Google came over and said, never use Eclipse. So I jumped over to Sublime and worked furiously to catch up. First lesson learned. I'm going to supplement this with the Go tutorial on pluralsight.

OSCON 2014 Day 1 - OpenStack & Docker Tutorials

It's Day 1 of OSCON and it's the first of the "tutorial days". It's similar to the few days leading up to VMworld where you can pay a little extra and go to the pre-conference bootcamps. You can look at the entire OSCON 2014 Schedule to see the list of tutorials and sessions.

The conference feel is unlike any of the big ones. There wasn't a single banner outside advertising the event and there were only a handful banners and signs inside that pointed where you needed to go. In fact, it took me about 10 minutes to figure out that OSCON was sharing the venue with 3 other Cons and I had to walk a quarter mile to get to the location.

As much as I really wanted to attend Get Started With the Arduino - A Hands-On Introductory Workshop, I figured it probably wasn't in my "career's" best interest. Maybe I'll do this tutorial next year since it's been going 4 years strong. So I opted to attend Getting Started with OpenStack: Hands on Tutorial with Egle Sigler & Cody Bunch, and Introduction to Docker: Containerization is the New Virtualization with James Turnbull.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a new fish (shawshank reference) when it comes to OpenStack and Docker. I've spent a good deal of time messing with the both, but I've never taken any formal training. It's the same thing as your boss telling you "Go install vCenter" when you have no idea about the underlying features and functions of ESXi. When messing with any new technology I believe you need to grasp the foundation before you start going crazy. There's only so much you can learn from self-discovery and reading documentation. This is why I opted to take these "introductory" courses so I can learn from the people who make the product.

Ruby Example with the EMC ViPR REST API

Yesterday, I built out a small ViPR instance in my home lab using Virtual Isilon to start messing with the APIs. I wasn't really planning on showing this particular API because I'm wanting to play with a different set of APIs, but I figured I would take the time and show a ruby example of using the ViPR REST API. REST is awesome. Flat out. I spent part of yesterday trying to decipher the vSphere APIs with Rbvmomi and got completely lost. REST is BEST.

This ruby script is pretty simple. We are going to use the rest-client and JSON gems to fetch some information and parse it. The script will log in, spit out information about every vCenter instance, display host information for each vCenter instance, and display ViPR Service Statistics. I don't have anything configured just yet for storage, but the ViPR REST API is incredibly easy to use.

VMware View PowerCLI Active Session Count

I'm just throwing a quickie out there...

I originally wanted to create a small ruby or python script that collected the Active Number of View Sessions currently running for a small project we are running internally. Come to find out, there isn't an API available for VMware View (TBD documentation for Horizon 6) so I had to rely on Powershell to do this for me.

I'm sure there are PS gurus out there that will tell me they can condense this down to a single line, but that's not how my brain works.

World Cup Fun with Ruby on Rails

TL;DR - just go here -> http://worldcupstats.cfapps.io/ -> now at http://simpleworldcupstats.herokuapp.com/

The World Cup is in full swing and While watching the Brazil v Chile game yesterday I figured I would play around with the unofficial World Cup API. You know the saying "if you don't use it, you lose it"? Well, it seems very true for me when it comes to coding. It seems like I have to constantly re-teach myself things when I don't code for a month or so. On with the fun.

William Lam posted on twitter about The World Cup API and Alan "Super PowerCLI Guy" Renouf even made some PowerShell cmdlets in his article PowerShell your world cup.

Discussing Cloud Foundry Summit on The Cloudcast

Big thanks to Aaron Delp (@aarondelp) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely) for inviting me to be a guest on The Cloudcast episode #149. We discussed my time at Cloud Foundry Summit and what it means to enterprises out there. If you are bored with virtualization, you should listen and maybe start seeing the light... i know i did.

A Summary from the show (taken from thecloudcast.net)

Cloud Foundry Summit 2014 - A Review and Perspective

I've lived in a world of VMs for the past few years and since I started learning Ruby on Rails last year, I've seen a whole new light. You hear all the time that software is eating the world but it's starting to really settle in for me. This is where PaaS and Docker start to shine. As applications become less monolithic, the need for VMs diminish. PaaS and Docker are a new frontier.

To put it in perspective, check out this slide below from the opening keynote. Software is disrupting every industry and one of the things that Andrew Clay Shafer (@littleidea) said at the end of his final keynote on Wednesday was "If you aren't creating a software company, then someone else is...and you will lose".

From Zero to Cloud Foundry on vSphere: Part 3 - Deploy Cloud Foundry with BOSH

We're on to Part 3. In Part 1, we deployed MicroBOSH that enables us to deploy BOSH. In Part 2, we deployed BOSH which got us used to using manifest files. The manifest rules all. This is all adapted from the official documentation located at Deploying Cloud Foundry on vSphere.

This tutorial will go over the steps it takes to deploy Cloud Foundry on vSphere. Here are the proper steps:

Part 1 - How to install MicroBOSH
Part 2 - Deploy BOSH with MicroBOSH
Part 3 - Deploy Cloud Foundry with BOSH

NOTE: This final part has not been 100% verified. The deployment of this Cloud Foundry manifest requires the following infrastructure: 72 vCPUs, 200GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage. Of course, my home lab doesn't support this so I kept getting timeout errors during the deployment. My problem is that my vCenter server can't keep up with the deployment speed. My vCenter Server Virtual Appliance is only configured with 8GB of RAM but it needs something much beefier to be able to handle the amount of requests. I believe this is the case because my vSphere Web Client would lose connection for a few minutes and when the deployment stopped, the Web Client started responding again. If you do test out this manifest below, please confirm it by mentioning it in the comments below. I will hope to test this in a real lab environment soon.

From Zero to Cloud Foundry on vSphere: Part 2 - Deploy BOSH with MicroBOSH

We're on to Part 2. In Part 1, we deployed MicroBOSH that enables us to deploy BOSH. BOSH is needed to deploy Cloud Foundry. This is all adapted from the official documentation located at Deploying Cloud Foundry on vSphere.