Next step in my VCF on VCF journey is building the networking between the two environments. Of course, I have my trusted pfSense appliances that do the routing, but of course, I want to be able to create my own NSX-based virtual network. So the first steps are to create a little design on what I want to accomplish. So in the first phase, I will be creating Edge Node clusters on both VCF WLD’s and configuring BGP between them,…
From one of my customers, I got a question on how they can downsize a stretched cluster in a VCF environment. This is basically following the first 5 steps in the “Replace a Failed Host in a Stretched Cluster” article: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/5.0/vcf-admin/GUID-92FD3AEE-5B5F-421C-B722-44AE0314D84E.html So I though, I’d try it out. We need to do the following steps: So, first, we get the Host ID’s. For this we go to the “Developer Center” in the SDDC Manager and click on: API Explorer. There…
Because I have had some issues with my lab in the past (having to rebuild it a couple of times) I switched my storage to iSCSI (see https://my-sddc.net/vcf-on-vcd-iscsi-configuration/), but I also wanted to have another means of redundancy and for that I am using vSphere Replication. I will replicate my two VCF instances to each other. The following setup is what I will be aiming for: So the “odd” volumes are Production and the “even” volumes are Replication (I will…
Because my lab has seen a couple of failures, with regards to storage, I got the advice to move my Management VM’s away from the vSAN, since a distributed storage layer on top of a distributed storage layer is not the best option, from a availability perspective. So I have been building a couple of Truenas iSCSI servers, in order to store my VM’s there and at the same time configure some replication, so I am safe from any issues…
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…
Because I created a template and redeployed this template a couple of months later, the password for the root account of the SDDC Manager ánd the root account of the vCenter server had expired. This led to a non-functioning SDDC Manager: And logging showed that there was an issue with a password: Changing the root password for the SDDC Manager wasn’t that big of an issue, just open a console, try to log in as root, and change the password,…
I received a request if it would be possible to get a copy of the environment so far. And to get a clean copy, it’s nice to have no VM’s running in the vAPPs. So It’s time to shut down the environment (and after that, power it back on again). So as a reminder,this is the environment we currently have (from a “physical” perspective): We are following these steps: Shutdown WLD’s First of all, we will be shutting down the…
I usually write technical content on my blog, because I have a passion for the technical part of my job, but I also love a lot of other aspects that make up my job. Both my day-to-day ánd “extra-curricular” activities. And maybe the titel is not the best fit for the question that I want to answer in this blog, maybe it should be: “What is this TAM @VMware?” Because every TAM is unique. We do have more or less…
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…