It seems like the most logical title, since the site is called My SDDC. Just a small recap of my experiences during this VMworld. It was my seventh in total, started out in Cannes in 2008, the first one in Europe if I remember correctly and a relatively small amount of people (although at the time, the 3000 people attending felt massive). This year there were approximately 14.000 people attending and I got to be one of them. Since I…
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…
I started off with VCF 3.7.1 in order to get a few upgrade options towards (then) 3.8. Now that 3.8.1 has been announced, we get even more upgrade options. One thing to realize is that upgrading is a step-by-step approach. If I look at the release notes for the different versions, I see the following: You can upgrade to Cloud Foundation 3.7.2 only from 3.7.1. If you are at a version earlier than 3.7.1, refer to the 3.7.1 Release Notes…
After another redeploy of VCF, I decided that before I create a new WLD based on NSX-T (which failed twice already), I would create some snapshots of the MD hosts, so that I would be able to return to a state that is valid (without a WLD in error-state and/or other messy stuff). I would like to create the snapshots in a powered-down state, so they are not just crash-consistent, so I decided to shut down the Management Domain (MD)…
We saw the history of VCF (Building a VMware Cloud with VCF (a short history)), deployment of the Management Domain (Deploying VMware http://vmwa.re/nestedesxiCloud Foundation – Management Domain) and the Management of VCF (Managing VMware Cloud Foundation – First Look), so now it is time to deploy the first Workload Domain (WLD). Since we are running a nested environment, we need to do some preparation before we can proceed. Preparation First things first. We need additional hosts. Since we are running…
Now that we have a Management Domain (MD) with all components running in them, let’s take a look at the environment. We know that the Cloud Builder VM (CB-VM) was responsible for bringing up the Management Domain, but after this job, it is basically finished. We thank it for its service and can dismiss the VM (unless we want to build more SDDC’s). The new sheriff in town is called the SDDC Manager, and when we log in to its…
After the theory (Building a VMware Cloud with VCF (a short history)), it is time to dive into the technical stuff. Let’s deploy us some VCF! VMware Cloud Foundation is deployed in multiple steps. Since you are deploying an environment that has dependencies on itself, there is one tool that you can use, to help you along. This tool is called the Cloud Builder VM (which is a pretty cool name ;)). It can be downloaded from the My VMware…
After playing around with NSX-T for a while (and that certainly hasn’t stopped), I wanted to take a look into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). VCF is in the heart of VMware’s vision for the future. In the olden days, all companies who started working with VMware’s virtualization software had to deploy this completely manual. And although the software was usually well behaved, a lot of choices needed to be made to have a smoothly running virtual environment, tailored to the…
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…
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…