Before we proceed further with the VVS Implementation, Broadcom has released a support bulletin for SSP Workload Cluster Instability which impacts SSP version 5.1. I’m seeing the same behaviour in my lab, so I’ll be applying this patch to the cluster before proceeding. There’s 2 KB articles we need to review, and it is advised…
Welcome back. In the first part we covered the SSP Deployment. We’ll cover the config and feature activation in this part. Once the deploy is successful, we can log directly into the SSP management – this was configured as ssp.site-a.vcf.lab We will be immediately prompted to onboard an NSX Manager. This demo will be for…
The VCF SSP is the next evolution of the NSX Application Platform that was available on version 4.x to enable functionality such as the Network Intrusion Detection/Prevention Services (IDS/IDP). Now we have some additional functionality such as real time security intelligence, malware prevention, traffic analysis and network metrics. Broadcom have just released the Lateral Security…
Most of the Holodeck environments I deploy are on NFS primary storage. The Synology device I have requires an additional ESX driver to enable the hardware acceleration features when using NFS.To streamline the deployment I’ve created a custom ESX image with the driver baked-in so I don’t have to roll it out after a deployment….
In a previous post I did some benchmarking of NFS storage in a holodeck environment. The performance gains over a nested vSAN environment were significant, so others may want to run this for their testing. The automated holodeck provisioning is fantastic for vSAN OSA/ESA deployment but at the time of writing we do not have…
Running a nested test lab is fantastic for convenience and cost savings. The down side is that performance tends to suffer.With VCF Holodeck we have a couple of storage options, and in this post I plan to compare benchmarks. These numbers will not be good, but I’m aiming to determine which is the least shitty…
Welcome back, in today’s post we’ll be covering the method to deploy a new Workload Domain with VCF 9. As you’ll now be aware, a lot of the functionality has now moved away from the SDDC Manager and into VCF Operations. First, we need to commission the 3x ESX hosts are are planning to use…
Note: Steps were performed using a beta build of VCF 9, make sure you check the latest documentation to ensure you have the official procedure. My upgrade environment consists of a Holodeck build with source version VCF 5.2.1. In Part 1 of this series, I performed the upgrade of the Management Domain to VCF 9….
With VCF 9 there has been a lot of changes regarding the environment management. In 5.2.x and earlier we perform most Infrastructure changes from the SDDC Manager but this is being replaced with the VCF Operations Console. To upgrade from 5.2.x to 9.0, we must first upgrade the Management Domain to 9.0 via the SDDC…
The NSX Edge Cluster deployment procedure has changed significantly in VCF 9. When we performed this in previous versions, it was via the SDDC Manager (either by JSON spec or GUI in newer VCF versions). As I mentioned in previous posts, the SDDC Manager is being deprecated, so the Edge deployment has moved into the…