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…
We have a new and improved workflow for Certificates in VCF 9:ESX Certificates now supported in the Operations Console!Auto-renewal now supported if you are using the CA Integration! First, we configure the integration with a Microsoft CA Now we can generate a CSR, and replace the certs directly from the CA. After a few minutes,…
VIDM IS DEAD! We finally have a new authentication solution for VCF, the Identity Broker. This intended to be the central authentication point for all of the VCF components, and we have new functionality such as integration with modern identity providers like Entra/Ping We have 2 deployment modes available:1: Integrated with Management Domain vCenter. This…
VCF 9 has mostly done away with the SDDC Manager – it still gets deployed, but is scheduled for deprecation. I assume it’s still there to allow customers that have deveoped their own automation workflows that hit the SDDC-M endpoint. We now have a new method of commissioning and deploying hosts via the vCenter directly….
VCF 9 has made major changes to the deployment process. The Cloud Builder + Deployment EMS spreadsheet have been deprecated and we have a brand new installer! To begin, we deploy an SDDC Manager/Installer appliance via vSphere. Once it’s online, we can begin the process. Now we connect the Installer to either an online or…
Holodeck has become the standard for home lab VCF, and it’s easy to see why. It’s probably going to be a while before the official scripts are released, so here’s the workarounds I’ve used to deploy a nested VCF 9 platform in my lab. I’ve probably oversized this environment, so I’m planning to tune it…
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….