On June 1st VMware released the latest version for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), version 5.0. The release of VCF 5.0 means that VCF customers now can benefit from all the cool new features included in vSphere 8.x and NSX 4.1.x.
The first release off VCF dates back to 2015. During the VMworld (what we now know as VMware Explore) of that year VMware launched a product called SDDC EVO. In the following years that product evolved to what we know today as VCF.
Today I received a message from a customer that he wanted to change his NSX passwords to more complex passwords for the various account within his NSX environment.
NSX allows you to change the passwords by using API calls. API are a common way of managing your NSX environment. I think changing the NSX accounts passwords is a good way for getting yourself familiar with using API for managing NSX. it is quite a simple task, and this is a good way to practice using a API and Postman. Let me talk you through how to accomplish this task.
A customer send out the request to take a look at a few alarms they received in the NSX Manager console. The alarm they received was about a expiring certificate for local manager.
We did some investigating from the NSX Manager and it was clear that this was a self-signed (not linked to the company own PKI infrastructure) and it was in use. This last comment means we have to use the Application Programing Interface (API) to tell NSX to use the new certificate.
Since this is a production environment we don’t do anything before we have verified that a recent backup of the NSX database is available. Please take note that a VMware snapshot is not supported the restore a NSX Manager Cluster. It is best practice to have a scheduled NSX Manager backup schedule. Before we start working on the environment we create a manual backup of the NSX database.
For one of our customers all NSX related questions are routed to me (pun intended). I received a customer ticket stating that they where not able to remove an unused NSX created port group although it is not in use while observing from vCenter.
After some investigating within NSX it was clear that this issues was caused by an orphaned logical port. NSX allows you to do allot of the config from the UI, but for some actions it is required to turn to the application programming interface (API). NSX provides a programmatic API to automate management activities. The API follows a resource-oriented architecture by using JSON object encoding. Clients interact with the management plane by using RESTful web service calls over HTTPS.
vSphere 8 has been released on October 11 in 2022. It was first announced during the VMware Explore US (the event previously known as VMworld). vSphere 8 includes many new features . To be clear, when we talk about vSphere we talk about both vCenter Server and ESXi.
Compared to VMware vSphere 7 U3, this new release has increased a number of hard limits:
In this blog article I will first give you some history of the NSX product and how it evolved to the current product that we all know today. Next I will explain the security use case for NSX. And show you step by step how to implement this in your environment.
A bit of history
In 2012, VMware acquired a company called Nicira. One year later VMware launched of the first NSX product from to the public. One year later in 2013 VMware launched NSX for vSphere (NSX-V). NSX-V came with its limitations. To name a few It was tied into vCenter and it was not possible to create multi-tier routing. In 2016 came VMware launched NSX 1.0 which later evolved into NSX Datacenter. Now fast forward to January 22 of 2022, on this day VMware release NSX for Datacenter version 3.2.0.1. This release came with a long list of improvement on his predecessor. The migration and upgrade assistance is very much improved to allow this version to operate in a wide variation of environments. Another big change is the launch of the Kubernetes bases NSX Application Platform. Lees verder
DPU-based Acceleration for NSX is a result of Project Monterey. VMware began with this project around two years ago. VMware will continue to offer support for hypervisor-based NSX architectures, but the capability of running NSX on a DPU or SmartNIC offers major advantages for customers that require accelerated network performance such as healthcare and financial services.
In this blog I will take you step by step to understand the magnitude of DBU-based Acceleration for NSX.
On VMware Explore US (the event previously known as VMworld) vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 was announced. In this blog I want to explain what has been changed. vSAN was first introduced back in 2014, the product has been evolved allot in these past 8 years. A few of these changes are support for All-Flash, Encryption, Deduplication and allot improvement in how vSAN handles failures and maintenance mode.
Placing a VMware vSphere ESXi host in maintenance mode works the same whether the VMs run on vSAN or other types of attached storage. But if the VMs are running on vSphere on a Nutanix cluster the process of placing a host into maintenance mode does work a little different. This is because of the way Nutanix is working together with VMware vSphere ESXi. On every VMware vSphere ESXi host on Nutanix, there is a VM called Controller Virtual Machine (CVM). This VM controls and managed the storage usage. All the storage IO for a host goes through that CVM VM. Lees verder
In a SDDC project the customer is requesting to rename the vLANS and vSphere vCenter Portgroups. Since the costomer is using NSX-T Datacenter the place to perform this rename is actions is the NSX-T Datacenter Manager console. The location where you can find this information is under Network>Segments. Or via the API.