Blog

As many know, I have had a long time relationship with NetApp and have always been a huge fan of their technology.  Much of the automation that I have done for customers has in some way revolved around NetApp integration in some facet.  Recently, I have even open sourced some of my code to help […]

When I began this blog at the beginning of the year, I did not know how far I planned to go.  I knew that I wanted a good technical blog and something that I found visually appealing.  Being new to blogging, I had very little experience with WordPress sites and found that I was overwhelmed […]

TIERING! Well, this isn’t the only new feature but I must admit that it is probably the most exciting new concept.  Tiering in AWS has long been a request and now to see if natively available in OnCommand Cloud Manager (OCCM) is very cool.  What is tiering and why does it change the way we […]

Over the many projects that I have built using Chef, I sometimes need to do a quick and dirty command to pull details from the node as part of the converge.  Most often, I use these commands in my custom resources.  Of course, the challenge has always been with the unit testing.  ChefSpec is the […]

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Raleigh, NC to attend the NetApp A-Team ETL event and learn about NetApp’s roadmap.  I found the event very eye opening as it was my first time on this side of the conversation.  I am excited to see where things will head with HCI and Cloud integrations. While […]

Several weeks ago, I started messing about with the NetApp Docker Volume Plugin (nDVP) and building a project for a client.  Over the course of this past month, I had the opportunity to get a lot of keyboard time and test many of the features against ONTAP Cloud.  In fact, the project is using multiple containers […]

I am building a project for a client that requires a lot of DevOps style integration into ONTAP Cloud.  In their particular case, I need to create and destroy many volumes to trigger test scenarios.  I creates 10s of new volumes per hour and delete them within minutes.  Previously, this type of work is not […]

Yesterday, I needed to add a few registry keys to a CHEF cookbook that I am developing for a client.  I am creating a base OS cookbook for Windows and as part of the solution, we need to update registry keys.  In the past, I have done some minor work with basic DWORD and REG_SZ values.  In […]

Today, I finally decided to debug an interesting issue that I have run across while testing the NetApp Docker Volume Plug-in.  Part of the testing that I am doing involves deploying a Docker host, installing the plug-in, and provisioning containers and volumes on NetApp ONTAP Cloud.  All has gone great and very simple to manage. […]

One of my client’s CHEF developers recently contacted me about an issue that he saw in his unit testing.  The week before, I had given my version of a CHEF boot camp for infrastructure teams and had stressed the need for testing code.  This developer decided to retrofit some of his current cookbooks to focus […]