PowerShell Friday: Configuring vSphere MTU Size

February 19, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Several vSphere components can benefit from using a larger network frame size (MTU) than the regular size of 1500 bytes. vMotion, Storage: NFS, iSCSI and VSAN are examples that would gain some performance by increasing the frame size. In most cases, you would configure the MTU to a jumbo frame size, which is 9000.

Configuring the MTU size throughout your infrastructure can be tedious though, as you need to make sure you configure the entire chain of the network flow. If you’re not using Host Profiles for your ESXi host configuration, you have to make sure that you configure the … Read more

VMware NSX PowerShell Extension Open Sourced

February 1, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware NSX has an open API and it’s pretty easy to consume. PowerShell is the same way; it’s easy to learn and easy to extend. This week, Anthony Burke and Nick Bradford released a PowerShell extension called PowerNSX. As the name suggests, it’s all about managing VMware NSX.

Nick and Anthony put PowerNSX on Bitbucket, which means there will be a continuos release cycle (whenever someone pushes something to the Git repository). You can download and install PowerNSX using Git or by downloading the branch as a zipfile.

Prerequisites

To run PowerNSX, you need a couple of things pre-installed … Read more

Introducing the VMware NSX for vSphere PHP Framework

January 22, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a VMware NSX integration with one of my existing PHP applications. This application is tied into a development process with a new testing schematic which needed to use a the NSX features to test the code inside a tiered network setup. Of course, this needed to be automated and available on demand; enter the NSX API. Using the NSX API, I’ve been able to integrate network deployment and configuration inside the existing application (with not a lot of effort).

After getting a few requests from fellow NSX enthusiasts, I’ve decided … Read more

Ravello Systems: VMware NSX 6.2 Management Service Stuck in ‘Starting’

January 3, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Ravello Systems offers ‘Smart Labs’ where you can run a multitude of applications in Amazon or Google Cloud, including nested ESXi Hypervisors. This opens up the possibility of replacing a home lab system, where you have noisy power guzzling servers set up at your home and move your test lab to the cloud. I have been using Ravello for a while and just got around to upgrading my VMware NSX blueprint to NSX 6.2.1, which is where I ran into an issue:

The NSX Management Service did not start on boot; it was stuck in ‘Starting..’ for about 5 minutes … Read more

vCloud Director: Removing Network from a vApp without shutting it down

December 30, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Caution: this is not supported by VMware. This is ‘this is possible’ post, not a standard procedure. Take care if you go forward.

Within vCloud Director, you can dynamically add networks to vApps and virtual machines, just as within vSphere. Moving the network of a virtual machine from networkA to networkB within vCloud Director is also a non-disruptive operation, as it should be. But for some reason, the removal of a network from a vApp, requires the entire vApp to be shut down. Ever since I’ve started working with vCloud Director, I’ve been asking VMware why that is (as it’s … Read more

VMware Samples Exchange goes into beta

November 22, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

When searching for scripts that relate to VMware (PowerCLI, Perl VILib, etc), you usually end up on a blog or a forum post somewhere, probably pointing towards GitHub for an example script. VMware themselves didn’t have a proper place for example scripts, like most vendors have in their developer centers. But an announcement on the VMware Community Podcast said that they are finally coming around to it and release a beta of the new VMware Samples Exchange.

The VMware Samples Exchange (SVE) is basically a gathering place for sample scripts for every day tasks you would need when working … Read more

The Future of Virtual Networking from VMworld – Part 2

October 26, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Following up on my post The Future of Virtual Networking from VMworld – Part 1 (read that before starting this one), I’m going to continue rambling on about some of the awesome future networking ideas floating around during VMworld.

Disclaimer: this post is also based on public roadmap information divulged by VMware and can be subject to change. Also, some of this is my interpretation of the features.

Distributed Load Balancing

With traditional load balancing, network traffic goes through an appliance (physical or virtual) before it connects to the actual target (load balanced server). This is set up this way … Read more

Lostdomain

Tagcloud

CategoryVMware