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Category: New Lab

VCF on VCD: 2b – Back-ups

VCF on VCD: 2b – Back-ups

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In my previous blog (https://my-sddc.net/creating-a-vcf-lab-on-top-of-vcd-part-2a-certificates/) I did the certificates, this time, we are going to configure the back-ups of the different components in the VCF environment. I’ll describe the following activities: Create SFTP site on my Windows DC If you already have an SFTP site, you can of course use that. I didn’t have one yet, so I thought it would be interesting to describe that process as well, for future reference (for myself as much as for anyone else…

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VCF on VCD: 2a – Certificates

VCF on VCD: 2a – Certificates

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I know, I wrote in my previous blog (https://my-sddc.net/creating-a-vcf-lab-on-top-of-vcd-part-2-workload-domain/) that the next steps would be related to networking and creating application, but there are a couple of housekeeping activities that need to be completed, before moving on. Therefore, this 2a blog, before I can deploy the networking components (and a 2b is to follow). What we need to do are the following things: Configure Certicifates By default all the components have a self-signed certificate installed. That might be fine for…

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VCF on VCD: 2 – Workload Domain

VCF on VCD: 2 – Workload Domain

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I created the Management Domain environment, on top of VCD (described in the previous blog) and now I will add a Workload Domain to the environment and after that, add an additional host to the cluster. When creating the Management Domain I already prepared a little bit for the Workload Domain. I added one extra host (empty) to the environment and that will be my basis for the new WLD. The first WLD I will create will consist of four…

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VCF on VCD: 1 – Preparation and Management Domain

VCF on VCD: 1 – Preparation and Management Domain

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At VMware Explore, I got an interesting question from a customer. They are a VCPP partner and are leveraging VMware Cloud Director to service their customers. They were asking if it is possible to create a (nested) VCF environment on top of VCD. I said, yes, that should be possible, the HOL is an excellent example of where this is done, but I saw little information on the exact way how to build this configuration. At VMware we, as TAM’s,…

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Redundant Multi-Site with NSX-T

Redundant Multi-Site with NSX-T

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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)…

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Good housekeeping on NSX-T, backups and certificates

Good housekeeping on NSX-T, backups and certificates

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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…

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Load Balancing with NSX-T 3.0

Load Balancing with NSX-T 3.0

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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…

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Creating stretched networks with NSX-T Federation

Creating stretched networks with NSX-T Federation

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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…

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Setting up layer-3 connectivity with NSX-T

Setting up layer-3 connectivity with NSX-T

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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…

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NSX-T 3.0 – Initial Configuration

NSX-T 3.0 – Initial Configuration

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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…

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