William Lam

Customizing vCenter Alarm Email Subject and Body

11.20.2019 by William Lam // 15 Comments

One of the automated actions that can be configured when a vCenter Server Alarm is triggered is to send an email notification. Over the years, I have seen a number of requests and questions about customizing the email and whether an email template exists. I personally have not used this feature much which has been around since the introduction of vCenter Server and mainly because I have always worked in an environment where we had dedicated monitoring tools that provide notifications including emails.

Most recently, I noticed an increase number of questions around this topic and I was curious on whether a solution exists today or if this is still a gap today? A quick Google search landed me on this 2013 VMTN thread which included several workarounds that customers have found. However, the only viable "supported" and "persisted" option at the time within that thread was to use the vSphere API/PowerCLI to customize the alarm action.

While going through this exercise myself, I found that our vSphere UI has had some enhancements since that 2013 thread and I thought it was worth sharing an update in 2019 on how customers can customize both the email subject and body for vCenter Alarms. One thing to note is that there is no generic email template that can be edited, the email customizations are applied on a per-Alarm action basis and this is applicable for both vCenter Server running in a traditional on-premises environment as well as for VMware Cloud on AWS or Dell EMC.

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Hands on with new AMD "NUC" platform from ASRock

11.16.2019 by William Lam // 7 Comments

It has been rumored for some time now that AMD would be re-entering the embedded/small form factor (SFF) market and with their latest generation of Ryzen CPUs, timing could not be more perfect. With the rise of Edge and IoT workloads, new constraints like cost, footprint, low to no tech-touch and power consumption is now top of mind more than ever for customers.

At VMware, we certainly see interests from customers across this spectrum whether it is a traditional "ROBO" environment running a handful of Virtual Machines for a supermarket or retail chain to an industrial site such as an oil rig or factory to mobile infrastructure like a car, ship or even a submarine. On top of these use cases, personal and development labs continue to be extremely popular amongst our customer base for learning and training purposes.

Today, the Intel NUC is still by far the most popular platform due to its size, portability, cost and low power consumption for running VMware vSphere, vSAN & NSX. The idea of an AMD "NUC" kit which includes a chassis, motherboard and CPU is something that that many folks have been asking for. With the market mostly dominated by Intel, I certainly welcome AMD re-entering this market as this will certainly drive new solutions and innovations in this market. With that said, AMD has re-entered into this market and this is initially through partnerships with several OEMs/manufacturers.

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Podcasts I listen to

11.12.2019 by William Lam // 3 Comments

In many of my conversations with customers, partners and colleague at this past VMworld, various topics about VMware software and solutions came up as you would expect. However, there were also many other topics that were discussed such as career, education, kids, tv shows, movies and podcasts.

One question that kept coming up over and over was around which podcasts I listen to on a regular basis? Like most, I listen to podcasts to help past the time while commuting into work, especially with our lovely Bay Area traffic. I also try to use this time as an opopournity to expose myself to other things happening outside of our immediate industry whether that is Bio, Retail, Healthcare, Economics, etc. I always enjoy learning about new things, especially the stories and innovations on how certain companies or things came to be, which is always super fascinating is usually the result of being passionate and having perseverance. Below are the podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis, a few like Worklife, Serverless Chats, Command-Line Heroes and TED Talks are recent ones which I have added and have only listening to a handful of episodes but they seem interesting so far.

I am also curious if there are other podcasts folks from the community would recommend? If so, please leave a comment as I am always on the look out for new shows!