- All Things Cloud

HCX 4.8 What’s New?! Selectable Mesh! #HCX #VMware #Migrations

November 22, 2023 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, it has been a while since I have blogged anything. Life is busy and HCX has been slowly improving with every release of the product. Now with 4.8, there is a big change which has been asked for by many customers and by us internally for a while. The chance to use multiple service meshes within the same cluster! Now let’s rewind slightly If you had a service mesh going from one source cluster to another, that has always been supported. If you had one source cluster that wanted to go to 2 or more destination clusters, that was fully supported with multiple HCX Service meshes. It was called the One to Many approach: In the diagram below, this […]

Nested Azure subscriptions gotcha for Aria Operations Cloud

October 24, 2022 Kim Bottu 0

When you are thinking about using Aria Operations Cloud and AVS Cloud Proxies to monitor Azure VMware Solution please read on! Aria Operations Cloud works by connecting an AVS Cloud Proxy to an Azure subscription. Should you have created 2 separate AVS regions into a single Azure subscription, these 2 AVS regions will share the same subscription ID. This might have some consequences for the stability of Aria Operations Cloud. In the screenshot below you can see that an AVS Cloud proxy will connect to an AVS deployment using a subscription ID. Ideally each region should use its own Cloud Proxy which will then in turn connect to Aria Operations Cloud. However, should you have nested 2 different AVS deployments […]

Creating #VMConAWS #NSX-T Firewall Rules and Segments with #PowerCLI

June 6, 2022 Bilal Ahmed 0

Well hello there. I had a customer that was wanting to do some work using scripting to create NSX-T segments and DFW rules in VMConAWS, for their PROD SDDC and for their new VCDR SDDC. Over the years I have seen a lot of people think that copying the VM data and being able to recover is the hard part when that can be the easiest part. Things like VCDR are designed to get your copies of the VMs up and running, but what about the networking and firewall rules you need to ensure communication works and is still secure? So, this ended up being a discussion on the various ways to create rules on both SDDCS and this led […]

Migrate VMs using #HCX #OSAM and #PowerCLI

April 4, 2022 Bilal Ahmed 0

Let’s talk about OSAM So “Operating System Assisted Migration”, can be used when you have Enterprise level HCX licensing. In the HCX Connector you have to download the OS agent which then you install onto the guest operating system: Once you have downloaded it locally, you can then copy it into the guest OS and install it, it then communicates back to the Sentinel Gateway Appliance and is picked up by the HCX Manager as you can see in the above screenshot. Now this is a good time to plug my co-workers’ blog https://www.chrisdooks.com/2022/02/24/automating-the-hcx-osam-sentinel-agent-install-via-sccm/ He discusses how to push the sentinel agent out via SCCM for Windows machines, which is much better than manually copying it across to various Windows […]

NSX CSM (Cloud Service Manager) CA Certificate

February 3, 2022 Chris Noon 0

I recently worked on a customer project where they replaced the NSX Manager certificate with a company-signed certificate using their own CA. This caused an issue when pairing the CSM with the NSX Manager, i.e. certificate error. This short blog post will run through the steps ran through to allow the CSM to peer with the NSX Manager. I understand this post won’t receive a lot of traffic, my hope is it helps someone in the future. The Procedure SSH to the CSM and login as root. Prepare your root CA cert in perm format and upload it to the CSM. On the CMS, get the JKS password from the following file: PASSWORD=`cat /config/http/.http_cert_pw` Add the root CA cert to […]

How the vExpert program impacted my life

January 12, 2022 Kim Bottu 0

When we look at the benefits of the vExpert program, it is logical that we look at the professional benefits first. After all, the program is mostly professional related. But what being a vExpert changed most to me is not the professional part, it is the personal part. The obvious benefit As with most people, I like to share information. On the one hand because I am proud I figured something out, on the other hand because I like to know that someone is using what I shared. It tastes like recognition and recognition tastes like candy to grownups. With that recognition come great jobs. Add the vExpert licenses, access to the vExpert Slack channels, access to the community at […]

Lets Talk About Protecting and Recovering VMs with #VCDR #vExpert

December 6, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

So now we have deployed and configured VCDR, now we can go into all the bits that allow you to protect your VMs and failover! Protection Groups So now we can get into the nitty-gritty of starting to create Protection Groups and Recovery Plans. This is the meat of it all, where you define what is going to be protected and how it should be recovered. As you can see you can define how VMs are added to the protection group by using Naming Patterns, Tags or VM Folders. In this example I have used vSphere Tags: In my vCenter you can see I have created a tag specifically for VCDR to use: Then we can look at the various […]

NSX ALB (Advanced Load Balancer) Design

December 6, 2021 Chris Noon 0

I wrote three (3) blogs on Avi Load Balancing, now rebranded as VMware NSX ALB (Advanced Load Balancer). These were around the basic concepts, base configuration, and that configuration using API. https://vmusketeers.com/2020/05/09/avi-networks-the-advanced-nsx-load-balancer/ https://vmusketeers.com/2020/05/24/avi-networks-base-configuration/ https://vmusketeers.com/2020/06/19/avi-network-base-configuration-via-api/ I noticed it was difficult to find a single post that discusses the different types of design solutions. In this post, I want to discuss the design decisions when deploying an ALB solution and expand on my previous blogs. Management Components The management components in the ALB solution are the controllers. The controllers are what the users interact with that which pushes instructions to the data plane components. They can be deployed in one (1) of two (2) ways: Single Controller: A single controller is deployed […]