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,…
VMware Explore in Barcelona: What a week it was. This was not my first major VMware event. After having been at 8 previous VMworlds (the first in 2008) this was, however, the first one as an employee and of course, literally, the first VMware Explore Europe (since the rename of the event). As a Technical Account Manager, I was able to go to this event and help out at “TAM & Customer Success 360 Customer Central” (TSCC). This is a…
Today I sat the aforementioned exam: I did that fairly unprepared, hoping (maybe against hope) to pass based on (quite a lot of) experience in designing, deploying, and troubleshooting environments. I did check the Exam Guide: https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/certification/vmware-advanced-deploy-exam-guide.pdf and took a look at some of the preparation sites: and I especially liked Graham’s Exam Simulator: https://virtualg.uk/vcap-dcv-deploy-2020-exam-simulator-free/ although that is related to version 6. I didn’t do all the tasks in the Exam Simulator (I did none ;)), but I looked them…
When upgrading my home lab to NSX-T 3.2.0.0 in December, I ran into an issue, where I got an error message: At that moment (3.2 was júst released) I took a look at some support articles (the benefit of being a VMware employee) and saw that I was not the only one having this issue. Shortly after encountering this, I saw that 3.2.0.0 was pulled as a method to do an upgrade (and was only available as a greenfield installation)…
Because I tend to “pause” both my vCenter Servers and my NSX-T Managers (for a quick start of the Lab), I ran into an issue with time synchronization on the NSX-T managers. This is especially problematic when using Tanzu. When the manager was resumed, the “old” time was still active (taken today, on October 28th): Instead of doing a reboot of the appliance (which would kind of negate the function of pausing it ;)), I tried to resync time. The…
It has been a while since I created a new post, mostly due to the fact that I started working at VMware on March 1st this year. The ride has been phenomenal and I love my new (TAM) job, but the consequence is that I had very little time to do technical research on new and existing products. I have been following (internal and external) training on several products, so my interests are very much triggered to do stuff on…
Well, if you are working in or close to IT, this is a sentence you come across every now and then and usually, it means that the person writing it, is changing jobs. The same applies to me and this post. After working at PQR for a little over five years I am joining “the mothership” VMware as of March 1st. At VMware I will be working as a Technical Account Manager – Multi-Cloud, which means I will be helping…
In my work, I am often doing updates for customers that are not using VMware Cloud Foundation. And when doing these updates, it is very important to be aware of the differences in compatibility between vSphere and vSAN. They both use the drivers that are installed by the update process, from Update Manager or Lifecycle Manager, but they maintain different Hardware Compatibility Lists. When I did an update of vSphere for a customer, deploying the latest updates from vSphere, I…
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…
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)…