NSX Data Center Archives - Page 5 of 10

The Future of Virtual Networking from VMworld – Part 1

October 18, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMworld Europe took place in Barcelona last week and my experience was mostly centered around NSX. A few technical sessions and a lot of meetings later, I have been given an insight into the future of virtual networking and it’s awesome! In a mini series (otherwise it’d be much too long and windy) of posts, I am going to discuss my interpretation on how this will look.

Disclaimer: this post is based on public roadmap information divulged by VMware (mostly the great mind Bruce Davie) and can be subject to change. Also, some of this is my interpretation of

VMware NSX 6.2: Support for Multiple vCenters

August 21, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware NSX 6.2 dropped yesterday with some pretty awesome features. I’ll be going through most features in separate posts and this one is for the Cross-vCenter feature. Before 6.2, the NSX Manager and vCenter had a one to one relationship, making certain dual datacenter designs quite difficult. Unless you had deployed stretched clusters, your network policies were linked to one site (unless you scripted your way out). With NSX 6.2, this changes in a big way.

NSX 6.2 introduces Cross-vCenter, which allows you to deploy multiple NSX Managers (up to eight!) that synchronise their configuration. The NSX … Read more

Manually preparing ESXi hosts for VMware NSX

August 9, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Usually when installing VMware NSX, the Update Manager takes care of ESXi host preparation. It takes a few VIB packages from the NSX Manager and pushes those to the ESXi hosts to prepare them for VXLAN, the distributed firewall and the distributed router.

It can happen that this process fail, for one reason or another. For instance, if your Update Manager is on the fritz or if you don’t have an Update Manager (haven’t tested this, but would imagine that that would be an issue). In those cases, whatever you do, you won’t be able to properly prepare your … Read more

Integrating VMware NSX with VMware vRealize Log Insight

July 12, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware vRealize Log Insight is a log analyser with capabilities to receive logs from regular syslog (so every device that can send syslog over the network) and from agents for Windows and Linux. Mostly every device can be configured to send logs to it and it can be used for quick and easy operation tasks, giving one a full picture of their environment.

Inside Log Insight, you can install (or create your own) content packs. These content packs are a way to create dashboards with filtered data. The filtered data is usually determined by queries to the Log Insight search … Read more

Removing VMware Data Security after vShield to NSX upgrade

June 17, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

An existing vShield environment can be upgraded to a full NSX environment, as described in my VCIX post “Upgrade VMware NSX Components”. All vShield components can be upgraded, except for one; vShield Data Security.

The documentation states: NSX Data Security does not support a direct upgrade. You must uninstall the current Data Security software before upgrading to NSX Manager. After NSX Manager is upgraded, you can install NSX Data Security version 6.0. If you upgraded to NSX Manager without uninstalling Data Security, you must do so using a REST call.

A few days ago, someone came to me with … Read more

The (Un)Official VMware VCIX-NV Study Guide

April 6, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

If you’ve been here before, you most likely know about my VMware VCIX-NV series. I blogged my way through the VCIX-NV exam and got some good feedback from people who were also studying for VCIX-NV. I completed the objectives list a while back, but one thing remained: a compiled PDF with all content.

It took a while, but after a lot of text formatting, fighting with Microsoft Word and adding a bunch of new stuff, I ended up with a total of 245 pages which make up the first edition of The (Un)Official VMware VCIX-NV Study Guide. This guide … Read more

VMware NSX-v Configuration Maximums

March 17, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware usually publishes a Configuration Maximums paper on their products. NSX has quite a bit of specifics that have a limit, but there is not an official configuration maximums paper yet. I hope there will be one soon, but for now I’ve compiled a list of findings from my travels on the interweb.

Most of the figures on NSX 6.1 are confirmed by a paper from PSO, others are from the documentation and real life limits.

Description	NSX 6.0	NSX 6.1
Relations
vCenters	1	1
DRS Clusters	12	12
NSX Controllers	3	3
Hosts per cluster	32	32
Hosts per