Random Technology thoughts from an Irish Virtualization Geek (who enjoys saving the world in his spare time).
LifeOfBrianOC and I recently had cause to build out some new lab infrastructure to host nested ESXi VMs. As part of that build we wanted to be able to deploy identical nested testbeds i.e multiple testbeds, each with their own set of nested hosts and supporting infrastructure, each of which would use the same VLAN... Continue Reading →
I use nested hosts for just about all of my testing, whether in my homelab or when kicking the tyres on something in my VMware corporate lab. One thing that used to frustrate me no end was that my VCF ESXi upgrades (especially from ESXi 6.7 to ESXi 7.0) would regularly fail. At first I... Continue Reading →
Its been a while, but we are finally welcoming the disaster recovery solution back into the family in the form of the Site Protection and Disaster Recovery Validated Solution for VMware Cloud Foundation. It reintroduces Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication in combination with NSX-T Federation to allow recovery of SDDC Management components such as... Continue Reading →
So I finally got the time and opportunity to start contributing to this great initiative. I've done lots of work with and around PowerVCF before, but never actually contributed code. Thats changed with this release. Hurrah! In my spare time, I've been doing a lot of PowerShell development on internal tooling used to prepare for... Continue Reading →
As part of some recent testing, I had the need for a quick and easy backup tool for creating imaged-based backups of my various virtual machines and appliances. To get moving quickly I decided to use a little tool called ghettoVCB created by William Lam (https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2015/05/ghettovcb-vib-offline-bundle-for-esxi.html). It's easy to install, has a near zero learning... Continue Reading →
It’s been an interesting few months working on the just released VMware Validated Design 6.0. It’s a BIG release. Every component in the management stack has had a major version change and to add to that we completely changed the operating model from the 5.x days. Starting with VMware Validated Design 6.0, we are now... Continue Reading →
If you have a lot of configurations in a lab the way we do in VMware, then most of them are using private networks that are not even routable inside your company, let alone the internet. So you can very quickly get into a nested rathole of RDP/SSH sessions from your terminal to a jump-box... Continue Reading →
Here's the second of two ~5 mins videos showing VMware HCX in action - this one showing its Migration capabilities with some flash cards to let you know what each section is about. The original 3 post series on building out VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) is here Migration walkthrough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2WqNdo3XH4&t=109s
I covered building out VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) in a 3 post series here but thought it would be cool to cut a few demos to show it in action. Here's the first of two ~5 mins videos - this one showing its DR capabilities with some flash cards to let you know whats... Continue Reading →
Have you ever built a VM and went a bit nuts in terms of the initial maximum size you allocated to the VMDK? Something like this? I know I have. Extending a virtual disk with VMware Fusion is a piece of cake, but shrinking one (and by shrinking I mean reducing the maximum size of... Continue Reading →
Here's a little something I found in my folder of scripts that someone else might find useful. I created it to backup vRealize Automation Entitlements for Catalog Items and Resource Actions. Originally it was needed to ensure we could retain the correct entitlements during an upgrade of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but it can be used... Continue Reading →
As part of building, testing (and breaking!) Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we had the need for reusable, virtual instances of the entire vRealize stack and all the supporting components both beneath it (vCenter, PSC etc) and above it (Avamar and such). So we made extensive use of VMware vCloud Director (vCD) to create templates we could... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 3 of my VMware HCX Breadcrumb Build Series HCX pretty much does what it says on the tin, and is pretty straight forward to get running. Some observations below: You will need access to the internet. Dark sites might struggle a wee bit, as the HCX appliances need to reach out to... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 2 of my VMware HCX Breadcrumb Build Series In the last post we gathered all the detail needed to setup HCX between a Source and Destination system. This post will get the configuration up and running. Remember that a single source can support multiple destinations, but the source element of this build... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 1 of my VMware HCX Breadcrumb Build Series One of the reasons I put together the VVD 4.3 on VxRail Breadcrumb Build series was that I wanted to have a go at using VMware HCX to migrate workloads between a VxRack SDDC and a VxRail. In this series, the ultimate goal is... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 10 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series Initial Thoughts Firstly, this build was a lot of fun. I've spent so long over the past few years working on automation and being knee deep in the minutiae of getting the smallest of tasks done via API etc that its been really... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 9 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series Nearly there folks! Last post for the configuration of VVD on VxRail. While the topic is the same as Post 5 where we did logical networking for the management VxRail, theres' not quite so much to do on the SEC VxRail, so this... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 8 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series As before, we'll deploy and tweak the NSX infrastructure for the SEC vCenter in this post, and then deploy the logical networking in the next post Anything in the format [input_value] represents a value from your preparation that you should insert (without the square brackets... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 7 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series As with the first VxRail we deployed for management use, the SEC VxRail also needs some minor tweaks before we can consider it VVD aligned. Thankfully, the list is shorter than with the management Rail, so we will get through this relatively quickly.... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 6 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series Congratulations on making it this far. Post 5 was a hard slog to write, so I'm sure it took some time to consume / use it too. The good news is that from here on in, you've more or less seen it all... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 5 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series Via previous posts we have gotten vSphere up and running and deployed NSX for the management VxRail. The next major task is to configure the logical networking, including the Load Balancer for the PSCs and the Edge Gateways and UDLR for North/South routing... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 4 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series VMware NSX is not part of a standard VxRail deployment, but its an integral part of VVD, and potentially anything you want to do on top of VVD. In this section, I'm going to walk through the deployment and tweaking of NSX basic... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 3 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series With the default VxRail deployment out of the way, we now need to tweak the setup of the Management VxRail to align it with VVD expectations. From here on in, the VVD build is pretty much completely manual (other than when we use... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 2 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series With all the relevant detail gathered, the next step is to deploy the first of two VxRails. This Rail, with a little tweaking will become the management vCenter/cluster which will host all of the vSphere components (including the external vCenter and second PSC... Continue Reading →
Welcome to Part 1 of my VVD on VxRail Breadcrumb Build Series Note: If you've read this before, you might want to rescan it. I've revamped how I laid out the data you need to gather as I felt this integrated better with the rest of the posts in the series Having spent the past... Continue Reading →
FearDamhan 