All posts by stephenst

Keystore Management with VCF

Keystores contain certificates used by Java-based applications to authenticate and encrypt HTTPS traffic. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) leverages a keystore and automates a significant part of the interaction with it. As a result, management of the keystore is often overlooked.

In this article, I’ll discuss the keystore used by VCF, why you would need to manage it, and demonstrate some of the commands you might use.

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When passwords expire…

Most platforms today implement a password aging system that requires a user to change the passwords used within a specific interval or have access automatically disabled. VMware is no different. By default, password aging is enabled on most VMware products, including vCenter, NSX, and so on.

In this article, I’ll discuss what can happen when passwords expire within a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment and demonstrate how you can avoid issues.

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VMware Cloud Foundation Security

Securing a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment can be a daunting task at times. There are several products that can be deployed, and each has specific things that need to be looked at. It’s especially important to think of VCF as a solution though, as actions that you may take on an individual product can impact the functionality of the solution as a whole. Today, however, this just got a bit easier…

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Building a VCF lab with pfSense (Part 1)

Part 1: Defining the Architecture

Building a lab running VCF is made easy through the use of the VCF Lab Constructor (VLC). When run in the ‘automated’ mode, VLC will build out a nested environment and deploy VCF in it. It even abstracts a lot of the networking setup to make it as easy as possible. But what if you want to build out the network manually? In this series of posts, I’ll walk you through doing exactly that!

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Minimalistic VCF 4.0 Deployments with Kubernetes

No doubt, you’ve heard about the recent release of VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 and its support for Kubernetes (K8s).  Although you would like to play with the product, the resource requirements seem greater than the resources you have available. Today, I’m going to talk about how you can get a VCF 4.0 environment up and running with the least amount of resources…

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