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Showing posts from February, 2018

VMware User Environment Manager Condition Logic

One of my customers is using UEM and wants to set up a default printer per user group, but only set that default printer if the user hasn't already got one configured.  Setting up a default printer as a User Environment policy is trivial, but the conditions to preserve existing settings were interesting. We determined that, if the current default printer contains either the words "Microsoft" or "Webex", then we'd consider it to be unset and would correct it, otherwise we'd leave it alone.  Of course, we also need to detect that the computer is in the correct room group, too, so what's that logic look like?  I wrote it out in PowerShell style pseudo-code like this: If ((DefaultPrinter -match "Microsoft" -or DefaultPrinter -match "WebEx") -and ComputerGroup -eq "RoomA"){Set Default Printer}. My first challenge came from the fact that, while UEM Conditions do offer logical AND and OR, they do not offer parenthesis.  Wh

Troubleshooting with vRealize Network Insight

I've had the opportunity to use vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) lately during a network migration project and it has proven invaluable.  We've used it to collect data about the subnets before they're migrated and we use it to help troubleshoot issues after the migration is completed.  It's given us great visibility into the traffic on the network and into where that traffic is being blocked.  So, how do we use it? Before the migration, we use it to scrape a ton of data from the source subnet, as we need to know what's going on with the servers that are running there.  At the start of the project, we attempted to learn those details by asking the application owners about their applications' requirements, however we found that the vendor documentation was universally poor, especially when compared against the needs of micro-segmentation. To get that information, I execute a very simple query in vRNI: flows where subnet = <subnet> .  This returns a list o