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.
Continue reading Keystore Management with VCFMost 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.
Continue reading When passwords expire…
During VCF 4.2 deployment I ran into a new error that I hadn’t see previously. Usually I am using VLC and all the pre-reqs have been taken care of for me. However in this instance I needed to deploy VCF in a nested environment under vCloud Director where VLC wouldn’t work. I loaded up my ESXi hosts and configured their IP/DNS/NTP settings, enabled ntp and ssh, and setup their networks and disks etc. Deployed Cloud Builder and populated my deployment spreadsheet. When I got to the validations after submitting my spreadsheet I ran into the following error:
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…
Continue reading VMware Cloud Foundation SecurityPart 3: Deploying VCF
In the previous parts of this series, I discussed the architecture of the environment and we went through the configuration of pfSense. Now it’s time to get our SDDC deployed in our home lab, using VLC to drive VMware Cloud Foundation.
Continue reading Building a VCF lab with pfSense (Part 3)Part 2: Configuring pfSense
In the last article, I explained the environment that we would work towards building out. Now that we have the plan down, let’s get started by getting pfSense configured.
Continue reading Building a VCF lab with pfSense (Part 2)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!
Continue reading Building a VCF lab with pfSense (Part 1)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!
Continue reading Install VCF, Workload Management and Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster in an afternoonNo 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…
Continue reading Minimalistic VCF 4.0 Deployments with KubernetesIt 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.
