VMware Explore 2022 – The 2 minute story around multi cloud in the Virtual Machine & Dev world

VMware Explore 2022 – The 2 minute story around multi cloud in the Virtual Machine & Dev world

Things have changed over the last few years. I have become a dad, my blog was on pause, but now I am back :) And so are our IT-events. Like Olivia Newton-John have foreseen it in 1982 – let’s get physical.

VMworld is now VMware Explore – and a lot has changed. The window for VMware was open just for a short timeframe (a little reference to himym) has decided to not be solo anymore & get part of broadcom. Even though we are in the middle of the takeover and certain scenarios have been discussed I am looking forward to how VMware will present itself during this years VMware Explore. To bring you on track what major topics are going to be the theme I am going to give you a short wrap up about the current state of VMware’s VM & Container/Dev strategy.

Register HERE

As in the years before VMware will have two main conferences in the United States (San Francisco) & Europe (Barcelona). Besides that 4 more 2 day events are coming to countries with a huge growing market around IT.

The topic will remain the same as the last years: multi-cloud multi-cloud & multi-cloud (and for sure workplace :). VMware’s Cloud Console is gaining more and more cloud services. A lot of common products we use are available as a subscription based service & still there is a lot to do from my point of view.

VMware follows certain strategies in the world of multi-cloud. One of those strategies is

“One (cloud) foundation to rule it all”

Within the pure infrastructure & virtual machine space VMware is pushing its cloud foundation (vSphere, vSAN & NSX) into all major clouds for several years now. The goal here is to convince customers & enterprises getting rid of their datacenters to migrate everything as it is in a lift & shift manor to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, Oracle Cloud or one of the plenty VMware Cloud Provider’s out there.

And if you don’t want to go to the cloud? If you simply want to keep your datacenter or choose a partner as a co-location for your datacenter VMware is going to give us surely more insights in vSphere+ & vSAN+: the new subscriptions around vSphere & vSAN included in a centralized cloud console. What would be the target of the business to go that road?

This strategy is is something we have seen for years now. What are the challenges for VMware & it’s partners? Convince companies that it is more useful to keep the current operations models you have to today & migrate it to the cloud. That will just works when you talk to companies that are satisfied with how the IT is operates today. Otherwise the CIO will prefer a way to migrate to the native infrastructure service instead of putting it on a vmware-in-the-middle stack.

If you have a solution based on vSphere/vSAN/etc. running today, that satisfies the business goals but lacks scaleability, availability (in terms of – I need that solution on all continents within days) and maybe operability the VMware Cloud Story is just great. IMO the best way to get the quick wins of lift & shift projects into the cloud.

But since most cloud initiatives also wants to reduce the amount of legacy VMs with a concrete set of things like cpu, memory & disk we need to talk about modern applications that are not just installed on a ‘fat’ system. We need to talk about applications that scale out if required & scale down to zero once they are not used. The answer to that is:

tanzu

tanzu

tanzu

Now you see it :) VMware’s Tanzu is an interesting name for all tools & solutions around developing application & running them. Over the years the story around kuberentes has changed a lot and seems to be finally finalized (the story is finalized not the products & velocity of features / products within tanzu).

Within the comdivision team we did some cool stuff around the infrastructure part of tanzu & if someone would ask me what the goal here is I would say the following.

The cloud native landscape is huge and to get things here up & running from scratch is nearly impossible for enterprises.

With tanzu & its tools VMware tries to make a lot of those things consumable in an easy fashion. From an infrastructure point of view Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) clusters are the key.

You run this K8s conformant (VMware supported) cluster everywhere (on vSphere/EC2/Azure VMs), manage it centrally with the SaaS solution Tanzu Mission Control.

If you want to create new clusters -> Just do it. If you want to scale out k8s clusters -> Just do it. If you want to extend clusters with services from the Cloud Native landscape? -> Just do it.

With just do it I mean -> run a simple cmdlet for the pros or click on the proper buttons in Tanzu Mission Control.

From my point of view what Cloud Foundation is the core foundation for the infrastructure within all the clouds, is the Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) cluster for everything cloud native.

So I am really looking forward on new things coming into the cloud native world & I am really hoping that broadcom will follow VMware’s current strategy in the cloud-native space.

Better together: #vSphere 7 and #NSX-T 3.0 OR We are slowly getting friends ;)

Let me start with a quote I wrote down 5 years ago (wow did time pass by).

IMO this quote is still correct (maybe I should have used network & security skills) and really changed the quality of services I can deliver within the IT field. My NSX journey startet at this time with homelabbing and learning NSX-v from the one and only fellow comdivision partner & friend Matthias Eisner.

NSX-v; NSX-T; NSX Datacenter; NSX Cloud; NSX Advanced Load Balancer; NSX Intelligence.

Woa woa woa ….. that’s a lot of NSX…. Remember; NSX is not a single product. NSX is a suite of network & security products fullfilling VMware’s dream: Deliver every network & security service in software.

NSX-v (or NSX for vSphere) has been the software defined networking solution for vSphere evolved from the product vCloud Networking & Security. We were able to to create software-defined VXLAN networks or software defined network services with edge services gateway in a simple manor & create microsegmentation around vSphere based virtual machines.

It was good but it was a product around vSphere and not a real network product (which made it easier for me to get started with it).

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VCAP-NV Deployment Exam Preparation: Tips and Tricks

During VMware Empower 2019 in Lissabon my colleague Jens Henning and myself had the honor to do two breakout sessions about the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Network Virtualization (VCAP-NV) exam.

In this session we covered tips and tricks for the deploy exam. This short post should summarize the content for all those people who weren‘t able to attend. The following information are totally suitable for the VCAP-Deploy exam in all kind of VMware‘s tracks:

  • Datacenter Virtualization
  • Network Virtualization
  • Desktop- and Mobility
  • Cloud Management & Automation
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VMware #NSX 6.3 Controller – Failure / Data loss behaviour

It’s been a month since NSX 6.3 has been released. It just came to my attention that an unknown behaviour of the NSX-Controller has been changed with that release.

We have 3 NSX-Controller while 2 of them should at least be available to remain complete functional. As we all hopefully now the NSX-Controller manages tables (VTEP, MAC, ARP) for Layer-2 VXLAN Operations (if we have selected hybrid or unicast as a replication mode).

NSX-Controller Failure

The following tables tries to explain the impact of controller failures in case we are in Unicast or Hybrid-Mode in case of Layer-2 switching functionality:

NSX Controller Available Cluster-Status NSX-Controller Operations Mode Impact
3 healthy read/write No Impact
2 degraded read/write No Impact
1 degraded read only New VMs or vMotioned VMs will have networking issues
0 headless(-chicken) New VMs or vMotioned VMs will have networking issues

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Let’s discover #vROPS Management Pack for #NSX

The more I work with #vROPS (vRealize Operations Manager) the more I love it (I know that it has a little bit of a learning curve).

The more I work with #NSX the more I love it (hell-yeah… the learning curve might be even bigger).

In both cases I did a lot of training and consulting work during 2016 and it is about time to bring those two solutions together and maximize our benefits. If you have licenced NSX and vRealize Operations Manager in the advanced edition you can make use of the SDDC Management pack, which includes the management pack for NSX 3.0.

In the following I want to give you a quick rush over the installation and features of the mentioned management pack.

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NSX and nested ESXi environments: caveats and layer-2 troubleshooting

After having NSX running in a nested environment, I started last week to integrate / built a NSX environment between my physical and nested ESXi hosts. To be honest, achieving this was more complicated than I have expected. Anyway it was a good trip to improve my NSX troubleshooting skills and maybe the key-findings can help one or another to avoid the problems I had.

From a logical-level my goal was pretty straight forward. I have 3 physical (vSAN) ESXi hosts running n-nested ESXi hosts. All of them are managed from a single vCenter and should be part of a single transport zones where n-VXLANs (unfassbar viele) will be deployed.

Logical_design

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Why learn VMware #NSX

This is the ‘real’ first post in my why learn section here on vLenzker. If you are looking for sources how to learn more about VMware’s (new) software-defined networking flagship, please check my let’s learn VMware NSX section.

So why do I believe NSX is a great chance for everyone working in the server virtualization field to extend his knowledge and become a better sysadmin, consultant, architect?

Yes sure, we are taking some network functions (routing, switching, dhcp, …) away from the current solutions and bring them closer / integrate them deeper with the hypervisor on the computing nodes. Does that mean we will get rid of classical network know-how/knowledge/people? Nope.

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Get ready for NSX phase 0: Migrate from a vSphere Standard to a distributed switch: manual and auto

The distributed switch (vDS) is a really nice piece of software within the vSphere environment. It offers a variety of very useful features (NIOC, Health Check, Central management, LACP, LBT, Netflow, and so many (features with fancy abbreviations) more). Especially if you want to move to NSX the distributed switch is mandatory. Since analytics showed me that views about my vDS blogposts are increasing it seems that there is a demand for the vDS within our virtualized environments (it’s still an enterprise+ only feature)

Migrating from a vSphere standard switch to a distributed switch is not that complicated at all if you plan it properly. Over the years I collected a lot of (troubleshooting) experiences with the vDS. Anyway I want you to learn from my mistakes to do (not-so-daily) tasks right from the beginning.

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Let’s learn #VMware #NSX

Version 1.1 (Date: 02/November/2015)

In the new post series let’s learn I will try to summarize useful links, classes, lectures and recommendations to learn specific topics. I used many of those resources to pass my VCP6-NV exam and thought it might be useful to share them with everyone.

NSX

In this part I am going to show you ressources to learn about VMware’s network virtualization’s product: NSX. I will try to update this post from time to time. Let’s start with initial version 1.0

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