My Software Defined DataCenter

After the release of NSX-T 3.0, nothing stands in the way of upgrading our demo environment to NSX-T 3.0, making it ready for vSphere 7. Because I wanted to see the checks in the upgrade process of vSphere 7, where it will inform you of the interoperability of NSX-T, I started with the upgrade of the vCenter Server: and choosing Upgrade. After following the wizard a new appliance is deployed. This appliance will then be used to upgrade the current…

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Earlier I wrote a post on the migration between NSX for vSphere (NSX-V) and NSX-T (https://my-sddc.net/migrate-nsx-for-vsphere-to-nsx-t/) . I stopped after the migration was complete because the post was long enough already and promised to come back with an article on the environment and clean up afterward. This is that article as you might have expected ;). Checking and repairing the environment So, after the migration, I found out a couple of things that I had to “repair”. They are all…

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As you might know, I use a test/demo environment from my employer. In this environment, I can demo the VMware SDDC products for customers or colleagues. Since the start of the environment approx. four years ago, I had a demo around NSX for vSphere, but as you know, the product has been announced to go end of support in 2022 and there will be no more development on it. Also, VMware and my company (PQR) advise customers who start on…

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I need to remove my first NSX-T Manager that I deployed in my test-environment. With other managers, you get the (easy) ability to do so from the GUI: But not for the one that was deployed as the first one in the cluster: (the option is missing). But it is still possible to do this. We need to manually detach the manager from the cluster, which can be done from one of the other managers. We log in to one…

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In this blog, I will be documenting the upgrade process of NSX-T to version 2.5. The first step in the upgrade process is to make sure that all versions of other components that I am running are compatible with version 2.5. To find this out, I use: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php#interop&175=&2= This will show me the versions that are compatible. Below vCenter and NSX-T: and the same table is available for ESXi and NSX-T: With the same result, which was to be expected…

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Now that we have learned the theory in Microsegmentation with NSX-T (part 1: methodology), we can look at the application of this methodology in practice. Methodology in action So after all this, let’s see a little bit of this methodology in action. First of all, it is important to know which traffic is flowing in the environment. An excellent tool to help in this respect, would be vRealize Network Insight, but not every organization is able to use this, so…

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After a number of blogs on network-virtualization, I thought it was time to start writing some blogs on another of the major three use cases: Security, through micro-segmentation. In my line of work most organizations where I implement NSX (first V and now T) are primarily interested in the security aspects of the product. In my presentations on NSX I usually use two pictures to show what security is like in most traditional environments. It looks something like this: (for…

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I learned something today, which in hindsight is obvious. Hopefully this helps someone that runs into the same “strange” (but not so strange) behavior. I created the following topology today, to prepare for some NSX-T demo I am giving tomorrow: What I (among other stuff) wanted to show, was that routing between Test-Segments “D” and “E” and “A”, “B” and “C”, is completely distributed. So when VM’s from the different segments live on the same host, no physical hops are…

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