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VMware Product Managers on Twitter

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VMworld is a great event for customers to connect with VMware Product Managers to provide feedback on their current challenges, issues and feature requests for our current products as well as future roadmaps and directions. However, this should not be the only time a customer can directly engage with our product managers. Last week at VMworld, I found myself connecting numerous customers and account managers to the various product managers at VMware to ensure that their feedback was heard by the right person.

This was quite tough as I become the middle-man and potentially bottleneck. Looking back on the event, I realized it would have been nice if customers could directly reach out to the various product managers within their respective areas and not only during VMworld but throughout the year. This is where I think Social Media can be quite powerful and leveraging tools like Twitter, you can easily provide a way for customers (for those that use Twitter) to reach out to the various product managers. I knew there were a few VMware Product Managers that were on Twitter, but during the week of VMworld I came across a couple new ones that I had not known about such as my good buddy Greg Murrary who is the PM for Appliances, Logging Infrastructure and the Platform Services Controller.

I figure it might be useful to create a list of all VMware Product Managers & Technical Product Managers that are on Twitter and share that with the VMware Community so that you can reach out to these folks when you have any questions, feedback or requests. Do not be shy, these are very friendly folks and I know they definitely would love to engage the community even more and this is another way you can directly interact with them! If there are others, please leave a comment with your contact information.

I have also created a Twitter list called VMwareProductManagers if you wish to just follow all VMware Product Managers.

Name Twitter Handle Responsibility
Aaron Blasius AaronBlasius ESXi Hardware Enablement
Alan Renouf alanrenouf VMware Automation: CLI + SDK + API
Alex Jauch ajauch VMware Cloud on AWS
Antoan Arnaudov antoan_arnaudov vSphere Auditing + Events + Alarms + Performance Charts + Logging
Ben Meadowcroft BenMeadowcroft VVOL
Bo Dong dbo_vmw VCSA Migration + Install & Upgrade
Bo Fu tofubo Fusion
Brian Graf vBrianGraf Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) + Predictive DRS + Proactive HA
Dennis Lu dennisgoblu vSphere Web Client (Flex) + vSphere HTML5 Web Client (H5)
Forbes Guthrie forbesguthrie VMware Validated Design (VVD)
Greg Murray gregmmurray Photon OS + Appliance Management & VCSA
Karthik Narayan _karthiknarayan vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC)
Matt Dreyer matt_dreyer VMware Cloud on AWS
Nakul Jamadagni jnacool vMotion + xVC-vMotion + Instant Clone
Narayan Bharadwaj nadubharadwaj VMware Cloud on AWS
Pat Lee patlee Horizon Air + Remote Experience Clients + 3D + Horizon FLEX + Fusion + Workstation
Rakesh Nair MynameisNair Virtual SAN (vSAN)
Ray Budavari rbudavari NSX
Roman Konarev RomanKonarev vSphere Content Library + vSphere HA
Sachin Thakkar sachin_t vCloud Air
Salil Suri SalilSuri ESXi Platform + ESXi Security + VMware Tools
Swaroop Dutta SwaroopvDutta Virtual SAN (vSAN)
Thomas Corfmat tcorfmat vRealize Automation
Venky Deshpande VMWNetworking NSX
Vishwa Srikaanth wishhva vCenter Server Performance + Scale
Yiting Jin YitingJin VMRC + Multi-vCenter Management + Fault Tolerance
Ziv Kalmanovich zivkal vSphere GPU Enablement

pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) 5.5.0-2014.1 released!

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I just saw an awesome update from Shawn Hartsock, a fellow VMware colleague. For those of you who do not know him, Shawn works in our Ecosystems and Solutions Engineering (EASE) organization and is the primary maintainer of VMware's pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) open-source project. The pyvmomi project was open sourced since last December which I had written about here, it has received over 3K+ downloads and has a very active community. Much of this success has been due to the hard from Shawn fostering an active community around pyvmomi.

The announcement today from Shawn is a new release of pyvmomi at version 5.5.0-2014.1:

As mentioned earlier, the pyvmomi project is a very active project and Shawn is constantly engaging with users looking for feedback, suggestions or requests for new samples to build. If you are interested in vSphere Automation and would like to leverage Python, be sure to check out the pyvmomi Github repository! Lastly, if you have written some cool scripts/applications or would like to request specific sample scripts, be sure to send a pull request to Shawn as we would love to see more contributions and collaborations from the community!

Quick Tip - How to enable Docker Remote API?

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I have been playing around with Docker lately in my home lab and have primarily been using the Docker CLI. While going through the documentation, I found that Docker also provides a nice remote REST API which by default, seems to be disabled. I was searching online but could not find any tutorials that provides clear instructions on how to enable the remote API for an Ubuntu Virtual Machine that I recently built to run Docker.

With some trial and error, I was able to finally figure out what was needed and figure I would document this for myself and for anyone else who maybe interested.

If you have Docker running on an Ubuntu (14.04 is what I'm using), you will need to edit /etc/init/docker.conf and update the DOCKER_OPTS variable to the following:

DOCKER_OPTS='-H tcp://0.0.0.0:4243 -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock'

This will have Docker bind to port 4243 which will be used by the Docker Remote API. One you have saved your changes, you will need to restart the Docker process by running the following command:

service docker restart

To test that the Docker Remote API has been properly enabled, we will list the Images currently in Docker (this assumes you have at least pulled down one image from the Docker Hub Registry).

In my environment, I have the following Docker Images:

enable-docker-remote-api-1
Using my Firefox browser and the RESTClient plugin, I can perform a GET operation on the following URL: http://172.30.0.199:4243/images/json as described in the Docker Remote API.

enable-docker-remote-api-2
As we can see from the screenshot above, we see the same Images displayed from the remote API. You can also easily test this by using cURL on the command-line by running the following command:

curl -X GET http://172.30.0.199:4243/images/json

If you are running CoreOS (which I also have running in my vSphere environment), you can enable the Docker remote API by following the documentation here. Hopefully this will be helpful for anyone looking to enable the Remote API but not able to find the exact steps.