Categoriearchief: VMware

Replace Local Manager Certificate

imageA 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.

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Unable to delete a segment in NSX because of an orphaned logical port

imageFor 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.

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vSphere 8: What is new?

Image result for vsphere 8 logovSphere 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:

  • Lifecycle Manager can now manage 1000 ESXi Hosts, this was 400 in the previous release.
  • A cluster can now hold 10000 VMs, this was 8000 in the previous release.
  • VM DirectPath I/O devices per host is increased from 8 to 32.

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NSX Microsegmentation

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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 4.0

imageDPU-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.

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What is new in vSAN 8?

imageOn 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.

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How to place a VMware vSphere ESXi host on Nutanix in maintenance mode

Download Nutanix Logo in SVG Vector or PNG File Format - Logo.winePlacing 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

vSphere vCenter and NSX-T, Portgroup and Segment inventory out of sync

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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.

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NSX-T Data Center required network ports

nsxtIn this blog post I will sum up all the network ports that are required to operate various capabilities that are within NSX-T Data Center. This blog is about current version of NSX-T Data Center, the current version is 3.2.0.0.1. Please acknowledge that not all features are available under each NSX-T Data Center Edition.
Please verify which features are licensed for your deployment so you can check which features you can deploy under your license.

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Setting up NSX Advanced Load Balancer for VMware Horizon

Back in June 2019 VMware published a press report on there intent to acquire AVI Networks. AVI Networks was a leader in the multi-cloud application delivery services. VMware has rebranded the load balancing product, it is now called NSX Advanced Load Balancer.

In this article I will describe how to install the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, and configure it for VMware Horizon.

This is the architecture we are going to build.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer
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