Today I tried this exam. I had done some preparation and for anyone else trying this exam, a couple of pointers that were critical for me to get to a passing score. Of course, you also need to know the stuff about a lot of other things, but for me, that knowledge was already there. I am talking about the more regular NSX stuff, like: Installation, Transport Nodes, Edge Nodes, Switching and Routing. So the following were some of the…
The Holodeck Lab is up and running and some of the components have been replaced by pfSense. This has been described in a couple of blogs. Now it’s time to start working on the use cases I wanted to explore with this lab. The first one is doing Multi Tenancy with VRFs within NSX. Firstly, the topology I am planning to implement: If you look carefully, I am planning to create two distinctly different network topologies, within the same NSX…
So, after the first two blogs, about the initiation of the Holodeck lab (https://my-sddc.net/holodeck-lab-building-the-lab/) and the first part of replacing some components with a pfSense appliance (https://my-sddc.net/holodeck-lab-replacing-networking-with-pfsense/), we now go a little deeper into the networking stuff. We are going to get BGP to work on the pfSense. Goal is to achieve the following topology: The NSX part of this has already been configured, as part of the Holodeck deployment. I grabbed the BGP configuration from the Cloud Builder appliance,…
After the first blog I posted in this new series: https://my-sddc.net/holodeck-lab-building-the-lab/https://my-sddc.net/holodeck-lab-building-the-lab/, I am going to change some of the networking. The Holodeck itself comes with a pretty good way of containing the lab environment in its own bubble, and only having one entry point (the Holo-A-Router), but since this is in my own home environment, I don’t really need to control it in the same way. I also want some more control over the entities that are in my lab…
After leaving Broadcom at the end of last year, I lost the control of my “VCF on VCD” lab environment (I am happy to say I was able to transfer it to a colleague, so it got a good new home :)), but that meant, I was without a lab. So, I had to find a way to start over again. I did have an old Proliant Gen8 server available, from my previous (and current) employer, but I ran into…
As a VMware by Broadcom employee in the VCF Business Unit, you can do three free exams per calendar year, on a voucher, so it makes it fairly riskless to try them out, without (a lot of) preparation. So in my case, I first tried the VCF VCP Administrator exam (2V0-11.24, https://www.broadcom.com/support/education/vmware/certification/vcp-vcf-administrator) in October, and today (about a month later) I tried the VCF VCP Architect exam (Exam 2V0-13.24, https://www.broadcom.com/support/education/vmware/certification/vcp-vcf-architect). In this blog, I’ll give a little bit of insight…
One of my customers asked a question about why a VLAN-based Transport Zone was not added to a cluster when it was created through the SDDC Manager. After some looking into this, and with the help of our Engineering organization, we found out why that is. In short, it needs to be defined as part of the deployment process, in the “Distributed Switch” section. It is not automatically added to a new cluster. So a short blog about how to…
I received an interesting question from one of my customers about the behaviour of vSAN with regards to policy changes to a policy which is applied to a content library and then especially the templates that reside within it. The customer told me that when they changed the Default vSAN Policy that was attached to a content library, the OVF-templates inside that content library, were not updated to comply with the changes made to the policy. So I tried that…
I deployed vRealize Suite LifeCycle Manager earlier (see: https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-aria-vrealize-suite-lifecycle-manager/ and https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-importing-other-aria-components/) and now want to upgrade them. Since the interoperability between SDDC Manager and Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager is the one I need to look at, it shows me I can upgrade to the latest version currently available, 8.14: But I need to do this in two steps. First upgrade 8.10 to Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.12 and after that, upgrade to 8.14: So I start with downloading the two upgrade…
First I deployed Aria Suite LifeCycle Manager (although still called vRealize for that version): https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-aria-vrealize-suite-lifecycle-manager/, then I deployed vIDM (https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-vmware-identity-manager/), but if I now want to deploy additional components, we don’t get to choose the size, below a certain threshold. For instance, if I want to deploy Aria Automation (vRealize Automation), it’s minimum size is clustered. Aria Operations (vRealize Operations or vROPs) is minimum “Medium”: So I will deploy the Aria Suite products manually and then import them into Aria…