VCAP-DCV Deploy 7.0 experience

VCAP-DCV Deploy 7.0 experience

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…

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Upgrade Failed NSX-T Edge Nodes (1G hugepage support required)

Upgrade Failed NSX-T Edge Nodes (1G hugepage support required)

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)…

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Time Synchronization with NSX

Time Synchronization with NSX

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…

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Workload Management (Tanzu)

Workload Management (Tanzu)

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…

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Change ahead…

Change ahead…

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…

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vSAN and vSphere compatibility differences

vSAN and vSphere compatibility differences

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…

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New versions of vSphere, vSAN and VCF. Small update, big changes!

New versions of vSphere, vSAN and VCF. Small update, big changes!

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…

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Redundant Multi-Site with NSX-T

Redundant Multi-Site with 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)…

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Good housekeeping on NSX-T, backups and certificates

Good housekeeping on NSX-T, backups and certificates

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

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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