Welcome to www.vCROCS.info

November 13, 2021 in - "Your Source for Automation/Monitoring/Logging Content"

I have learned a lot from the vCommunity, Powershell and PowerCLI web sites. I want to use this blog as a way for me to give back. If one person finds anything I post helpful, I will consider my efforts successful. Favorite Quotes: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do, We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

SaltConf 2021 - Presentation Replay

November 12, 2021 in - "Managing Windows with SaltStack Config"

I did SaltConf presentation for the first time at SaltConf 2021. Here is a replay of the video if you want to watch. Hope you enjoy and learn something. Session Details: Date: November 4th. Time: 10:00 am - 10:50 am Details: Track 1 - Managing Windows with SaltStack Config Presenters: Vincent Riccio and Dale Hassinger In this Presentation we showed how to use SaltStack Config to manage Microsoft Windows Servers.

VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin - Part 6

October 9, 2021 in - "How to use SaltStack Config with Windows Server and PowerShell"

Part 6: The latest item on my journey with VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin is going to be a lot PowerShell. I use PowerShell for a lot of Automation, Windows Server and Linux Server. When working with VMware vRealize SaltStack Config I constantly found myself going to the CLI to test and learn how the salt functions work.

SaltConf 2021 - SaltStack Config Session

October 2, 2021 in - "Manage Windows Workloads Through vRealize Automation SaltStack Config"

I will be doing a SaltConf presentation for the first time at SaltConf 2021. I attended SaltConf 2020 for the first time after VMware purchased SaltStack Config. This past year I have spent a lot of time reviewing SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin and I am excited to share what I have learned to hopefully help some Windows Server Admins get started. I wanted to learn one of the configuration Management products for a couple of years and after VMware purchased SaltStack Config the decision became obvious to me which one I should learn since I live in VMware vRealize Products all day, every day.

VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin - Part 5

October 1, 2021 in - "How to use SaltStack Config with Windows Server and PowerShell"

Part 5: The latest item on my journey with VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin will be an update to some items that I have talked about in previous posts. I have been spending more time with VMware vRealize SaltStack Config and I have learned some better ways to do some of the processes that I have talked about already. My goal to to learn and use the built-in functions that are already in the product.

VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin - Part 4

September 5, 2021 in - "How to use SaltStack Config with Windows Server and PowerShell"

Part 4: The latest item on my journey with VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin will be salt grains. I have a specific use case that made me start looking at grains. In VMware vCenter I use vCenter TAGs to organize VMs. I also use vCenter TAGs to organize VMs in vRealize Operations. I want to use the same logic of using vCenter TAGs in SaltStack Config.

VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin - Part 3

August 27, 2021 in - "How to use SaltStack Config with Windows Server and PowerShell"

Part 3: The next steps on my journey with VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin will be beacons and reactors. Working with Jobs helped me understand how to make changes Ad-Hoc. I have a Job to quickly stop the Print Spooler but what if I always want the state of the Print Spooler Service to be stopped. How do I NOT allow a Server Admin to login into the server and manually start the service?

VMworld 2021 - SaltStack Config Session

August 12, 2021 in - "Manage Windows Workloads Through vRealize Automation SaltStack Config [MCL1895]"

I will be doing a VMworld presentation for the first time at VMworld 2021. I have attended VMworld since 2012 and it has been a goal of mine to do a presentation at a VMworld since the first year I attended. There are always so many good sessions to attend. We are putting many hours into this presentation so that the people attending feel it was worth their time and learn a lot about the topic.

VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin - Part 2

August 5, 2021 in - "How to use SaltStack Config with Windows Server and PowerShell"

Part 2: I have been able to spend more time with VMware vRealize SaltStack Config. Here are some updates on my journey with SaltStack as a Windows Server Admin. Auto-Accept new minions: I wanted new Windows Server builds (minions) to be auto accepted into SaltStack Config instead of someone manually approving new minions. To do this you need to have a reactor.conf file. I created the file in SaltStack Config File Server in base/reactor/reactor.

VMware vRealize SaltStack Config as a Windows Server Admin - Part 1

July 16, 2021 in - "How to use SaltStack Config with Windows Server and PowerShell"

Part 1: I have recently started looking at using VMware vRealize SaltStack Config. This blog is a work in progress on my journey with Salt. I started at zero and let’s see what I discover as I work towards getting to PROD. So if this topic is interesting to you, check back often. I wanted to learn one of the server configuration products that are available like Salt, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc… but I wasn’t sure which would be the best choice long term.