Category Archives: VLC

These posts are directly related to the VMware Cloud Foundation Lab Constructor

VCF Infrastructure Disaster Protection (Yeah, backups)

NSX, VCF, VLC
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes.

Words to live by, and as the density of those backup tapes continues to increase (Last time I used backup tapes they were 400/800GB LTO3’s), so does the station wagons bandwidth! I’ll leave it up to you to get your tapes to the vault but let’s go through what it takes to get the pertinent VCF infrastructure configuration data into a state and place where it can be backed up and restored. This will include configuration of the backups for SDDC Manager, vCenters, Exporting VDS configs, and NSX Managers, lets go!

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New VCF Cluster size available!

VCF, VLC
VCF 4.4 gives you two node clusters

With the release of VCF 4.4 you are able to create a 2-node cluster! There are a few caveats with this;

  • You must use NFS or VMFS over FC for storage
  • You must use vLCM Images

Both of those mean that you can’t have a 2 node cluster in the management domain, as vSAN is required and it uses vLCM Baselines.

Let’s walk through what it takes to create a new workload domain with a two node NFS.

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Synology 1621+ Review

Gadgets, VLC

This is not my normal blog post, but.. a while back someone from Synology contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in reviewing one of their devices. Having never used one before I asked a few questions about running virtual machines on it and was sent a 1621+ which could run a small VM as it only has 4GB RAM. I wasn’t sure what I could do with this for what I was looking to test (backup/DR, running Cloudbuilder and a virtual router), but I was given a promise of something larger in a few months time where I could run multiple larger VMs. That was last summer and the person who sent the device has left Synology and now I’ve gotten a follow up from another person looking for my review. I did use the 1621+ for a few things while I was waiting for something that, unfortunately never materialized. I’ll detail those here.

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Easy lab VMs with Photon on VCF

Tanzu, VCF, VLC
Split' Photon Provides New Way to See Light | Dartmouth
The finding of the Majorana boson demonstrates that photons can be “split” into halves. (Animation by LaDarius Dennison)

For quite awhile I’ve been challenged to find a small Linux VM to do small tasks like demonstrating connectivity (ping) between a couple of *magic* SDN segments, or running an application that’s only available on, or well… just better on Linux. Here we’ll go through a quick run down on how you can build these easily and quickly. Future posts will build on this lab VM idea and we’ll add more functionality.

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Adjusting the VCF API Swagger

VCF, VLC
These go to 11 / Spinal Tap | Know Your Meme

The API for VCF is hands down, one of the most powerful in the industry. Allowing you to accomplish everything from scheduling backups, to rotating certificates and passwords across the deployment, to deploying an NSX Edge Cluster complete with Tier-0 and Tier-1 routers configured!

While the Developer Center is a great place to start and try out API’s, making it part of your enterprise automation/orchestration systems should be the goal. For that you’ll want the VCF API swagger file to import into your API Orchestration engine. While this isn’t able to happen straightaway, it’s easy to complete with just a few simple tweaks.

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When passwords expire…

VCF, VLC

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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Building a VCF lab with pfSense (Part 1)

VCF, VLC

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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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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