Now that a VCF 4.0 Management Domain has been deployed, we can move onto creating our very first VCF 4.0 Virtual Infrastructure Workload Domain (VI WLD). We will require a VI WLD with an NSX-T Edge cluster before we can deploy Kubernetes on vSphere (formerly known as Project Pacific). Not too much has changed in the WLD creation workflow since version 3.9. We still have to commission ESXi hosts before we can create the WLD. But something different to previous versions of VCF is that today in VCF 4.0 we can automatically provision NSX-T Edge clusters from SDDC Manager to…
On March 10th, VMware announced a range of new updated products and features. One of these was VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 4.0. In the following series of blogs, I am going to show you the steps to deploy VCF 4.0. We will begin with the deployment of a Management Domain. Once this is complete, we will commission some additional hosts and build our first workload domain (WLD). After that, we will deploy the latest version of NSX-T Edge Cluster to our Workload Domain. The great news here is that this part has now been automated in VCF 4.0. Finally,…
One of the most common requests in relation to vSAN performance is how much CPU and memory does vSAN actually consume on an ESXi host, i.e. what is the overhead of running vSAN. Through the vSAN Performance Service, we have been able to show both host and vSAN CPU usage for some time. However, up to now, we have only been able to show host memory usage, and not overhead attributed to vSAN. It has also been extremely difficult to determine how much memory vSAN required. Way back in 2014, with the first vSAN version 5.5 release, I wrote this…
On March 10th 2020, we saw a plethora of VMware announcements around vSphere 7.0, vSAN 7.0, VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 and of course the Tanzu portfolio. The majority of these announcements tie in very deeply with the overall VMware company vision which is any application on any cloud on any device. Those applications have traditionally been virtualized applications. Now we are turning our attention to newer, modern applications which are predominantly container based, and predominantly run on Kubernetes. Our aim is to build a platform which can build, run, manage, connect and protect both traditional virtualized applications and modern containerized…
In my most recent VMware Cloud Foundation post (part 13), I highlighted the fact that if you used NSX-T as the networking platform for your workload domain (WLD), you could not attach vRealize Automation (vRA) to such a WLD via SDDC Manager. In that previous post, I showed how to manually deploy the vRA proxy agents on the Proxy VMs. These Proxy VMs were already deployed via SDDC Manager as part of the overall vRA deployment through SDDC Manager, but the agents were not installed at this point. If NSX-V was used as the networking platform for the WLD, then…
I’m still on my VMware Cloud Foundation v3.9 journey. My latest task was to connect my vRealize Components to my Workload Domains (WLDs). In part 2 I deployed vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) and vRealize Operations (vROps), and then in part 3 and part 4, I rolled out vRealize Automation. Now I wanted to connect them to the WLDs that I had rolled out previously. SDDC Manager makes this really easy. In just a couple of clicks I had connected vRLI and vROps to both VI WLDs. However, on trying to connect my vRealize Automation (vRA) 7.6 to my WLDs, I…
I kept seeing an orange banner when I log into my SDDC Manager displaying a warning about my NSX Manager being backed up to the SDDC appliance rather than an external SFTP server. You may have spotted it in previous posts on VCF 3.9 already. I therefore decided to configure the NSX backups to use an external destination. The steps are very straight-forward but there are a few nuances which I will call out in this post. First, here is the warning (not sure if it is readable, but it is essentially telling you that backing up NSX Manager to…