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Quick Tip - Microsoft Power Automate expression to access specific row from Excel workbook

05.13.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Microsoft Power Automate is a pretty nifty service that allow users to automate various business processes using Microsoft Office 365 as well as supporting other 3rd party integrations. For a particular project I have been working on, I have been trying to figure out the best way to access a specific row of information from an Excel workbook such as the example below.


For anyone that does not have a scripting or programming background, Power Automate is relatively easy to use for basic process automation. However, if you have some scripting background, then the tool can feel a bit clunky, especially since each action must be manually created, one at a time and there are no bulk operations or even the ability to quickly duplicate an action for editing.

For my initial prototype, I had used multiple Excel Get Row action to fetch a specific row from my Excel workbook to be able to reference it later in my automation. Not only was this not optimal but I also ran into a number of connection issues since I had up to 40 of these actions. I had searched online and various Power Automate forums for better solution which would allow me to read the Excel data once and then reference it when I needed. From what I could find, most examples focused on a specific row within the document or required looping through the table which did not help me since I needed to be able to access a particular row on-demand.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation Tags // Excel, Microsoft Power Automate

Exploring the new vSphere with Tanzu VM Service with Nested ESXi

05.05.2021 by William Lam // 3 Comments

After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, I was looking forward to kicking the tires on the highly anticipated vSphere with Tanzu Virtual Machine Service capability. Both Oren Penso and Myles Gray have both done a fantastic job on their respective blogs here and here demo'ing the new VM Service.

While browsing through Oren's Github repo since I came across his blog post first, a couple of things quickly caught my attention. The first was a reference to OvfEnv transport with the YAML manifests and the second was that he was able to deploy an Ubuntu VM, which is interesting since only CentOS is currently officially supported. Why was this interesting? Well,Β with these two pieces of information, I had a pretty good theory on how the guest customizations were being passed into the GuestOS for configuration and this gave me an idea πŸ€”

I decided to put my hypothesis to the test and try out the VM Service and deploy one of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and as you can see from the tweet below, it worked! 🀯

πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚

It freaking worked! Go @VMwareTanzu#NestedESXi pic.twitter.com/udTdwvLbgN

— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) May 4, 2021

Disclaimer: vSphere with Tanzu and the VM Service currently only officially supports CentOS images for deployment, other operating systems are currently not supported. This is primarily for educational and experimentation purposes only. As of vSphere 8.x, you can now bring your own OVA/OVA for use with vSphere with Tanzu

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Nested Virtualization, VMware Tanzu, vSphere 7.0 Tags // Nested ESXi, VM Service, vSphere Kubernetes Service

Rocky Linux RC1 on ESXi-x86 & ESXi-Arm

05.01.2021 by William Lam // 4 Comments

We're happy to announce Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 is now available! Read more here: https://t.co/92oFcJvjgw #RockyLinux #Linux #Community

— Rocky Linux (@rocky_linux) May 1, 2021

This morning, I saw that Rocky Linux RC1 was now available and includes support for both x86 and AARCH64 (Arm) and I wanted to give it a quick spin on both ESXi-x86 and ESXi-Arm.

ESXi-x86

I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-x86 using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. You will however need to disable Secure Boot (VM Options->Boot Options) as it is currently not supported.


If you do not, you will see the following error message when booting up the ISO: Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation


The default network adapter for this GOS in ESXi-x86 is using VMXNET3 and it was automatically detected. If you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.


VMware Tools can be installed by running the following commands:

yum -y install open-vm-tools
systemctl enable vmtoolsd
systemctl start vmtoolsd

ESXi-Arm

I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-Arm using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. Networking for ESXi-Arm is using e1000e and if you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.

Unlike Rocky Linux for x86, there is currently not a VMware Tools package that can be installed using yum and my attempts at compiling VMware Tools lead to missing packages that are currently not available in their repository. I have already filed an issue on the VMware Tools Github repo for tracking purposes.

Categories // ESXi, ESXi-Arm Tags // Rocky Linux

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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