Some time back, nearly 6 years ago in fact, I wrote about how you might hit the NFS maximum value for the number of connections you can have per IP address when mounting a lot of shares from the same NFS target. You can find the article in question here. The question came up again recently, and I found that a few things have changed since I wrote that post. In this updated post, thanks to some feedback from our NFS engineers, I wanted to revisit this scenario and explain in some further detail what the limits are. First of…
If you’ve been following along on my NSX-T adventures, you’ll be aware that at this point we have our overlay network deployed, and our NSX-T edge has been setup to with DHCP servers attached to my logical switch, which in turn provides IP addresses to my virtual machines. This is all fine and well, but I’d also like these VMs to reach the outside world. NSX-T enables this through a feature called logical routers. In this post, I will talk you through how to configure a tier 0 logical router which connects to the outside world, a tier 1 logical router…
Now that we have an overlay network deployed, its time to turn our attention to the NSX-T Edge, and get it to do something useful for us. A NSX-T Edge can do many useful things for you (Routing, NAT’ing, etc). But I really want to keep things as simple as possible, so I will deploy my NSX-T Edge to provide DHCP addresses to my VMs. In order to do this, my Edge will first of all need to participate in the same overlay/tunnel network as my hosts. I will then need to create a logical switch that my VMs can…
I’ve recently begun to look at NSX-T. My long-term goal is to use it to enable me to build multiple Kubernetes clusters used PKS, the Pivotal Container Service. The hope is then to look at some cool storage related items with Kubernetes. But first things first. Kudos to both Sam McGeown and William Lam for their excellent blogs on NSX-T. However, I’m coming at this as a newbie, and I’m not using a nested environment, but rather a 4 nodes physical environment in my lab. And I am also not separating my cluster into management and production, but rather using…
I got a chance to revisit my docker swarm deployment this week after a bit of a break. I was a little curious about my setup because when I spoke to some of our ‘Project Hatchway‘ engineers, I was told that I should be able to launch a single instance of Nginx in Docker Swarm (“docker service create –replicas 1 -p 8080:80 –name web nginx”) and I should be able to access the web service using the following command from any swarm node – “curl 127.0.0.1:8080”. This was not what I was seeing. When I launched the Nginx service, the…
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking to update some of our older white papers on core storage topics. One of the outdated papers was on NFS, and a lot had changed in this space since the paper was last updated. Most notably, was the introduction of support for NFS v41 in vSphere 6.0, along with Kerberos based authentication. In vSphere 6.5, we also added Kerberos integrity checking. I decided to have a go at configuring this in my own lab. Before going any further, I need to thank Justin Parisi of NetApp for this guidance through this setup.…
It seems that 2-node vSAN for ROBO (remote office/branch office) deployments are becoming more and more popular. The fact that one can now connect the 2 vSAN hosts at the remote office directly back-to-back without needing a 10Gb switch has reduced the cost extensively. And with the introduction of a vSAN Enterprise for ROBO license edition with vSAN 6.6.1, you get the full feature set of vSAN on 2-node deployments. This new edition builds on the vSAN Advanced edition, and enables the use of features like native encryption and stretched clusters on a per-VM pricing model for smaller sites. The…