When deploying Holodeck, I like to add the VMs to a vApp so I can power-up/power-down the environment from one place. Because this is running vSAN, we want all the nodes to power up simultaneously to minimise any potential issues with the vSAN consistency.When we create a vApp, the VMs will just get added to…
There’s some tasks that I always like to do after deploying a fresh holodeck environment.This example shows how to automatically configure DRS rules to pin the vCenter to the first ESX host, and NSX to the second ESX host. This helps me easily find the VMs when starting up the environment. Here’s a PowerCLI example…
My posts mention Holodeck a lot, if you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t come across this yet, it provides a mostly automated method to deploy a fully functional VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) lab with reduced hardware. You can deploy a full nested VCF stack on a single (beefy) host, which make it much…
The L2VPN functionality of VMware NSX can be used to extend your software defined network segments into remote datacenters or your cloud provider tenancy. This provides an excellent solution for migrating your workloads without requiring IP address changes. This post will go through a sample configuration to configure an L2VPN and extend an NSX Overlay…
VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 now brings support for vSAN ESA! In this blog post, I’ll discuss the pre-requisites and show an example of how to deploy a new workload domain that can support vSAN ESA. For further information and deep-dives on vSAN ESA, check out VMware vSAN Blogs. Pre-Requisites: VCF 5.1: I’m using a VMware…
VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5.2 has just been released, let’s take a look at the upgrade process. Release Notes Not much has changed in the upgrade process from an end-user point of view, but my lab environment has a couple of Async Patches installed – we need to begin by enabling the forward upgrade to 4.5.2….
Today we’ll be performing a “scale-out” operation for Aria Operations for Logs (formerly vRealize Log Insight) using Aria Lifecycle. This workflow would be used if you find your Logs cluster is under-resourced and you wanted to add additional worker nodes, or if you wanted to scale out from a single node to enable a high…
This blog post will cover the process to scale up your NSX-T edge nodes when used in a VCF environment. You may find that your existing edge nodes are reaching their throughput maximums, or you may need to scale up to enable more CPU heavy features such as L7 Load Balancing, or Tanzu support. Edge…
Today we’ll look at the new licensing workflows in VCF 5.0. If you’ve already had experience with older versions of VCF, you’ll know that the licensing can be a bit fiddly. The SDDC manager doesn’t manage this process end to end, so you end up adding the license keys to SDDC Manager, then manually to…
The long awaited VCF 5.0 was recently released, here’s a post regarding my lab upgrade experience. Before you begin, read all the documents: !! VCF 5.0 Licensing Fulfillment Delays !! Official Release Announcement Release Notes VCF 5.0 Important KB Articles The source version for this upgrade is VCF 4.5.1, let’s get into it! Urgh, let’s…