All posts by bsier

Changing DNS and NTP with SDDC Manager APIs

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File:Lochstreifen-2.png - Wikimedia Commons

Not so long ago while working at customers, one of the things you didn’t like to hear was that old “data center services” would need to be retired. In my experience, it was usually because they were running an ancient version of FreeBSD or <pick you distro> that wasn’t supported any longer. New services would be stood up, with new IP’s of course.. and then you had to manually change it on every. single. system… The VCF DNS and NTP API’s go a long way to help in these situations!

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VLC/VCF Lab Dedicated Server, best value I’ve seen!

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The other day I was helping a friend of mine get VLC up and running on his server. When doing some discovery about what hardware he had I learned that it was a dedicated server hosted at OVH. I asked how much he paid per month and was quite surprised at the response. As this is something that we constantly run into… HOW much for a lab to run VCF?! I was surprised enough that I went out and got my own!

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Install VCF, Workload Management and Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster in an afternoon

VCF, VLC

Yes! It’s possible, I’ve done it.. twice, just to make sure :). At the risk of being redundant @Kyle Gleed was instrumental in driving K8’s in VCF consolidate and has a blog post and paper here, @Tom Stephens posted a great blog on Minimalistic VCF 4.0 deployments with Kubernetes, but I’m lazy and like to make things even easier. That is what I am to cover here, There are a lot of steps, and tons of screenshots making this blog post quite lengthy, my apologies.. I’ll learn to split these up!

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Multi-NIC, Multi-VDS, vSphere Cluster in VCF 4.0

VCF, VLC,

It seems like a good time to have an update post on Multi-NIC “stuff” in VCF 4.0. Before we get to the creation of the cluster, I think it’s important to go over one of the biggest networking changes in VCF 4.0/vSphere 7.0. With vSphere 7.0 came the introduction of the vSphere Distributed Switch 7.0 and with that, some welcome changes that I haven’t really seen mentioned anywhere.

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VLC- Expansion Pack – VCF 3.9.1

ESXi, VLC

The expansion pack feature in VLC can be used for a few things;
1) Building nested hosts
2) Expanding your nested VCF implementation!
3) Testing the limits of your hardware <- You know you want to!

In this post we’re going to talk about Building Nested Hosts and I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out how to do the other two things on your own, or I’ll write a blog article on it! Make sure you follow the implementation guide for VLC with regards to PowerCLI and OVFtool versions and settings.

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Getting vSphere 6.7U3b up and running on a non-UEFI server

ESXi

Hi all, I thought I share since I went through this yesterday on my HP DL360p G8 in the lab. It started out with the cheap-o USB stick I had installed ESXi on flaking out.. and for those that have had it happen it can be unnerving to say the least. I couldn’t power down VM’s, make changes to the config, etc… I knew what had likely happened and on a reboot.. well, it never came back.

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VLC-Build it for me, vRealize Operations deployment – VCF 3.9.1

VCF, VLC

If you’ve been following the VLC-Build it for me posts you should have VRSLCM up and running. As promised this exercise will be quite a bit shorter due to the work we put in getting VRSLCM built. vRealize Operations gives a view into operations management of both applications and infrastructure and, in the context of VCF, as you grow your solution help you plan, scale, and easily connect new Workload domains and their resources to be included in vROps pervue.

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VLC-Build it for me, VRSLCM deployment– VCF 3.9.1

VCF, VLC

After getting your external access up and running, I’m sure your ready to start deploying some additional solutions! Let’s start with the vRealize suite and that all begins with downloading and deploying VRSLCM – (vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager). Go ahead and get that queued up and downloading, it’s about 3GB in size and it should be available under the Repository -> Bundles page, click the Download Now button next to the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager bundle.

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VLC – Build it for me, External Access

VCF, VLC

So you got through all the BGP fun and have a fully deployed VCF instance, congrats! Of course now, you want do add some functionality and get your FULL SDDC on. Thankfully, there are only a few more steps to go and you’re already an expert at this.

The long and short of it is that SDDC manager will need access to https://depot.vmware.com. That means you’ll need outbound network connectivity and DNS resolution. Let’s talk about the outbound network connectivity first.

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Resizing the LCM Volume group on SDDC Manager

VCF

One of the users of the VLC (VCF Lab Constructor) had an issue with drive space when attempting to upgrade from VCF 3.9 -> 3.9.1. This has been a problem in previous releases at times as well, so I thought it’d be a good opportunity to post about it. That and I don’t post nearly as often as I want to!

SDDC Manager uses LVM for several of it’s critical mount points. Coupled with the EXT4 filesystem this allows those mounts to be very flexible and non-disruptive when increasing their size.

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