Well, if you are working in or close to IT, this is a sentence you come across every now and then and usually, it means that the person writing it, is changing jobs. The same applies to me and this post. After working at PQR for a little over five years I am joining “the mothership” VMware as of March 1st. At VMware I will be working as a Technical Account Manager – Multi-Cloud, which means I will be helping…
In my work, I am often doing updates for customers that are not using VMware Cloud Foundation. And when doing these updates, it is very important to be aware of the differences in compatibility between vSphere and vSAN. They both use the drivers that are installed by the update process, from Update Manager or Lifecycle Manager, but they maintain different Hardware Compatibility Lists. When I did an update of vSphere for a customer, deploying the latest updates from vSphere, I…
On September 15th, VMware has announced new versions of vSphere, vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and I must say that I am pretty impressed with the functionality changes. In a quick overview, the main changes are: vSphere 7.0U1 vSphere with integrated Kubernetes Melvin has grown Cluster size increase EVC for Graphics LifeCycle Manager enhancements vCenter Connect vSphere Ideas vSAN 7.0U1 HCI Mesh File Servics: SMB support! Shared Witness vLCM Enhancements VCF 4.1 NSX-T 3.0.1 VCF Remote Clusters Parellel NSX-T…
One of my customers is looking to create an evironment with DR capabilities, from a networking point of view. We have looked at using Federation, but multiple reasons exist why this is currently not the best way to go forward on this. So I am looking for an alternative method to create redundancy across sites, without the need to renumber IP-addresses on virtual machines. In my home-lab I have an environment consisting of two (virtual) sites, connected to one (physical)…
In every production environment it is critical to do some good housekeeping, but the same goes for a lab environment, so I added a signed certificate and configured a (scheduled) backup for my NSX-T Managers. As you might know, I have three NSX-environments in my lab, two sites (A and B), and one Global Manager (G). For all environments the configuration is more or less identical, so I’ll only show the configuration of one of them. Backup Especially important in…
I was triggered by a question on an older post, to revisit the configuration and setup of load balancing. The setup we are working towards is: We start with creating the T1-R-1 and connecting it to the Stretched T0, that was created in an earlier activity (https://my-sddc.net/creating-stretched-networks-with-nsx-t-federation/): Not connected to an edge node cluster, to make sure we can still do multi-tier distributed routing (see https://my-sddc.net/distributed-multi-tier-routing-in-nsx-t/). We do advertise the connected segments to the T0 (and the T0 already knows…
After the initial configuration and setup of NSX-T local and global managers ánd setting up layer-3 communication (see previous blogs), we can go for the real new thing of NSX-T 3.0, stretched networking with Federation. We are aiming for the following setup: In order to set this up, we need Edge Nodes on both sites (we have those) and a configuration of Remote Tunnel Endpoints (RTEPs). We also need to create a stretched T0 and T1 and setup BGP to…
After the installation (https://my-sddc.net/nsx-t-global-manager-installation-and-initial-setup/) and initial configuration (https://my-sddc.net/nsx-t-3-0-initial-configuration/), we can start building networks. In order to get connectivity from the virtual network to the physical network, we need to setup layer-3 connectivity. In order to be able to do that, I bought a small Mikrotik device, to allow me to play around with BGP/BFD and VRF’s. What we need to do to get layer-3 connectivity is: Create transport zones for transit networks Create an uplink profile for edge nodes Setup…
This blog is to describe the initial configuration of NSX-T 3.0. After deploying the appliances and combining them into one environment (https://my-sddc.net/nsx-t-global-manager-installation-and-initial-setup/) and deploying the vSphere/vSAN environment (https://my-sddc.net/building-the-lab-vsphere-and-vsan/) it is time to combine the two and create the virtual network environment. As a reminder, our environment is going to look like this: but that’s mainly the physical side of it. The virtual side is still something I have to figure out, but for now, it’s roughly going to look like…
Just a small tidbit. I have built the vSphere/vSAN part of the lab and am curious as to what the performance is, so I’ll use HCIBench for that: https://flings.vmware.com/hcibench. Deploying it is pretty straightforward, it’s an OVA: After that (and powering on), the configuration is done through the web-interface: Previous times I ran HCIBench at customers, I used VDBench as the bench-marking tool. In this version FIO is available, so I’ll give that a go. The “Clear Read/Write Cache Before…