Normally I am not that much into “step by step” upgrades of any kind, but since VCF 5 dropped today, I thought, maybe show how incredibly simple upgrading is. So first of all, make sure that you see the version within “Release Versions”: Then we can go and download the necessary components, in “Bundle Management”: There we download all the necessary bundles: Once the bundles have downloaded, we can start the updates. First step is doing a Precheck, to make…
I shortened the name of the blog-series, to make it a little easier on the eyes. I mentioned in my previous blog that I was going to build another VCF instance and make that a stretched cluster. However, I thought, technically it should be possible to change the already built VCF02 environment to that. The only thing that I need to do is change the IP-assignment on the NSX-TEP’s. Please note, this is nót (I repeat NOT) a supported method!…
When I have a new purpose in my mind, I want to move forward. So after preparing the infrastructure, I moved ahead with deploying the Management Domain, the Workload Domain and some housekeeping tasks (like backups and certificates). Most of this I have already documented in earlier blogs, but this blog will mention some differences and also show the ultimate goal (in a nice picture). The target environment is: I changed the IP addresses and the VLAN’s of the components…
Edit (January 6th, 2023). Because I used some VLANs and subnets I had already used for the WLD of the original deployment, I have changed this article to reflect the ultimate target environment. Okay, I said I would go on and configure NSX-T and create some applications on top of the WLD, but in the meantime, I had another idea that I first want to pursue. I want to evolve the environment I have into an enterprise-like platform and include…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
A short post on (part of) the upgrade of NSX-T from within VCF, since this is not the first time I ran into this. It is most likely related to the fact that I run a nested ESXi environment, but someone else might run into the same issue. The biggest problem occurs when upgrading NSX-T as part of the VCF upgrade process. What happens when upgrading NSX-T manually is that you run a PreCheck. This will tell you if everything…