WilliamLam.com

New Adventures

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Today, I will be embarking on a new adventure as I join the VMware R&D Organization as part of the Integration Engineering team. In this new role, I will be working alongside my team to help provide feedback directly to VMware engineering on how we can better integrate and simplify our products both from an operational and architectural standpoint. Needless to say, Automation will play a key role to help ensure that we have the proper interfaces (API/SDK/CLI) to interact with all of VMware’s products and help enable VMware’s vision of the Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC). In addition, I will also have the opportunity to research and explore new and interesting ways of leveraging VMware products which is something I am very much excited about!

I have been very fortunate to have been part of the Cloud Infrastructure Technical Marketing team here at VMware and had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented folks in the industry. I want to thank all of my Technical Marketing colleagues for all the innovative and fun projects we have collaborated on.

I am very excited for the new opportunity within Integration Engineering and I am looking forward to getting started!

ESXi Google Authenticator Is Now A VMware Fling!

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Earlier this year I wrote an article about using Google's Authenticator application to provide 2-Factor Authentication for connecting to ESXi using either the ESXi Shell locally or remotely over SSH. I also documented the process for compiling and building your own custom ESXi VIB with the help of two VMware engineers (Hongkun Xi & Jian Ouyang). Though the process was not terribly difficult, it did require minor source code modification and building a custom ESXi VIB. This also meant that you were required to lower the security acceptance of your ESXi host to community supported which is not a recommended practice. In addition, the custom ESXi VIB only supported a single administrator account which was root and additional work was required to support multiple administrators.

Well it turns out that both Hongkun and Jian have been quite busy enhancing this project in their spare time and have just released an ESXi Google Authenticator Fling! The Fling is distributed as a custom ESXi VIB which is signed by VMware, so you no longer have to lower the security of your ESXi host. It supports both ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 and it allows for multiple administrators to login using Google Authenticator.

Here is a list of the features that are supported:

  • Two-Factor Authentication for ESXi Shell and SSH access
  • Supports multiple administrators login on esx5.1, and single admin (root) on esx5.0
  • Support for 30-second TOTP codes
  • Support for emergency scratch codes
  • Protection against replay attacks

To learn more about the Fling and instructions on setting up the ESXi Google Authenticator, be sure to visit the VMware Lab's site.

If you have any feedback or questions, be sure to leave a comment on the Fling's web page here.

How To Pronounce Some Of VMware's Acronyms

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VMware's announcement last week on the new vCloud Hybrid Services offering generated quite a bit of buzz and excitement. One thing that I had noticed on Twitter during the announcement as well as the days following was discussions around the pronunciation of the vCloud Hybrid Services acronym (vCHS). There were couple of "ways" that folks have heard it pronounced and I thought I write this fun little post and share what the "official" ways of pronouncing some of these acronyms are (at least from my understanding working at VMware)

Disclaimer: I have no comments on us putting little v's on everything 😉

Below are the top VMware products/features that I have heard multiple acronyms for and the controversial on how to properly pronounce each of them. I have also provided a link to Google translate which provides a nice text-to-speech (lower right bottom) so you can listen to each of the official pronunciation. If there are other pronunciations that you have heard or any corrections, feel free to leave a comment.

Product Official Other
vSphere OpenStack Virtual Appliance (VOVA) vo-va (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vo-va) N/A
VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) v-san (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-san) N/A
vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) v-f-r-c (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-f-r-c) N/A
vCloud Air (vCA) v-c-a (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-a) N/A
vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) v-chess (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-chess) v-cheese v-c-h-s
vRealize Air Compliance (vRAC) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations Insight (vRI) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations (vROPs) vee-rops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vee-rops) N/A
vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops) v-c-ops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-ops) v-cops
vRealize Automation (vR / vRAuto) v-ra (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-ra) vr-auto (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vr-auto) N/A
vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) v-cake (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-cake) v-c-a-c v-cac
vRealize Business (vRBus) N/A N/A
vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) N/A N/A
vCenter Log Insight (vC Log) v-c-log (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-log) Log Insight
vRealize Code Stream (vRCS) N/A N/A
vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) N/A N/A
vRealize Hyperic (vRH) N/A N/A
vRealize Application Services (vRAS) N/A N/A