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)
Hi all, and welcome to 2021! Just a quick post about an issue I see on occasion that is easily resolved.
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!
Continue reading Changing DNS and NTP with SDDC Manager APIsThe 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!
Continue reading VLC/VCF Lab Dedicated Server, best value I’ve seen!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.
In order to perform all the automation tasks it does, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) must be aware of how to communicate to all of the components in its environment. The method used to obtain a list of these accounts and the passwords used have changed from VCF version to version. Today, I’ll show you how to do this with VCF 4.0…
Continue reading Password Lookup with VCF 4.0You’ve just deployed a brand-new VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 instance. You’ve configured the VCF repository and have downloaded the vrslcm bundle. You think your all ready to start deploying VRSLCM, and then…
Continue reading Installing the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vrslcm) without AVNs with VCF 4.0