Configuring NSX Edge to DLR OSPF

May 23, 2016 nsx vcix

As part of study for VCIX-NV I’ve given myself task of exploring in my new home lab all parts of NSX which I’m still not fully comfortable. One of these things is OSPF, to investigate this I came up with a test scenario and then worked through the steps to achieve a solution to meet the scenario design. Scenario …

NSX Backup and Restore

May 20, 2016 nsx vcix

As part of study for VCIX-NV I’ve given myself task of exploring in my new home lab all parts of NSX which I don’t use at work. One of these things is NSX Backup and Restore, its not that we don’t use these function but that its relatively high impacting if it goes wrong. To investigate this I came up …

NSX-V Load Balancer As A Service LBaaS

May 20, 2016 nsx vcix

As part of study for VCIX-NV I’ve given myself task of exploring in my homelab all parts of NSX which I don’t use at work. One of these things is NSX Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS), to investigate this I came up with a test scenario and then worked through the steps to achieve a solution to meet the …

NSX Activity Monitoring

May 19, 2016 nsx vcix

As part of study for VCIX-NV I’ve given myself task of exploring all parts of NSX which I don’t use at work. One of these things is NSX Activity Monitoring, to investigate this I came up with a test scenario and then worked through the steps to achieve a solution to meet the scenario design. Scenario Design …

Create VMware Virtual Machine Templates

May 17, 2016 vm guest customization vsphere

When creating virtual machine templates I’d like to do this consistently as such I’ll try and keep this post up to date with the settings I am including. CentOS 7 New custom VM named CentOS7, hardware version 11, guest operating system Linux version ‘CentOS 4/5/6/7 (64-bit)’. We’d like a …

vCloud Director REST API

Jan 16, 2016 vcd

If you find the vCloud Director GUI a little annoying a nice way to get the information you need is via the REST API. Using the REST API you can gather information (GET), update information (PUT) and call operational methods like (POST). There are many ways you would call the REST API, if you want to control this …

DevOps != Products

Oct 6, 2015 devops

The last 10 to 20 years in the enterprise has been defined by increasing capital spending on fixed assets (CapEx) while reducing the cost of staffing and operations (OpEx). Gartner report the growth of spend on enterprise application software (EAS) is continuing to grow and in 2015 will grow at 7.5% to $149.9 Billion. …

Project Bonneville - vSphere Integrated Containers

Oct 6, 2015 docker vsphere

Working for a company which develops software for business I’ve been keen on following the story of containers unfold. The explosion of containers and microservices in the software development space has been a revolution in the way applications can be architected and deployed. This has put a great deal of power …

VMware Projects Fargo (VMFork) & Meteor

Oct 6, 2015 docker vsphere

There was announced during VMworld a technology preview for Project Fargo (formerly VMFork) it is likely this will be launched with vSphere6. The aim of Fargo is to provides a fast, scalable differential clone of a running VM. I see this as very similar to Redirect-on-Write (RoW) methodology used by NetApp snapshots …

NSX Distributed Firewall Under The Covers

Jul 21, 2015 nsx dfw

An NSX distributed firewall (dFW) runs as an ESXi host as a kernel module added as a VMware Installation Bundle (VIB). The dFW rules operate on Layer 2 through Layer 4; although this can be extended through Layer 7 by integrating with a 3-Party vendor. L2 rules are based on MAC address L2 protocols like ARP, RARP and …