I think now is a good time to take a recap on what we have built so far with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). We’ve done a number of activities to date, notably the deployment of the management domain in part 1. Then we spend some time deploying the vRealize Suite of products in parts 2, 3 and 4. In part 5, we commissioned some additional ESXi hosts and then most recently we created our first workload domain in part 6, which included the deployment of NSX-T 2.5. Now we come to quite a long section, which is the deployment of…
The VMware Cloud Foundation 3.9 journey continues. In this post, we are going to build our very first workload domain (WLD). In part 5, we commissioned 3 x vSphere 6.7U3 ESXi hosts that will form the basis of our new WLD. A number of actions will take place during this deployment. Firstly, a new 6.7 vCenter Server will be deployed in the management domain. Then, the 3 commissioned ESXi hosts will be clustered together, allowing vSAN and vSphere HA to be enabled. We will also see NSX-T (version 2.5) deployed for the WLD as I am going to deploy NSX-T…
At this stage, we’ve done quite a number of tasks related to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Our management domain is up and running, and we also have the vRealize Suite of products deployed (vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Operations Manager, and of course vRealize Automation). Our next step is to commission some new ESXi hosts so we can create our very first VI Workload Domain (WLD) which we can start using for production purposes. This post will look at the steps involved in commissioning the hosts. Note that in this example, I am going to commission ESXi…
After returning from the holidays, one of the items at the top of my agenda was to become more familiarity with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those of you who are not familiar with VCF, it is basically the ‘easy button’ for deploying the full vSphere stack of products, including virtual storage (vSAN), virtual networking (NSX) as well as monitoring and logging products such as vRealize Operation, vRealize Log Insight and so on. However, it is so much more, because once VCF is stood up, it becomes the building block for the deployment of what could be termed the application…
As I got more and more familiar with running Kubernetes on top of vSphere, I came to the realization that it might be useful to be able to query the vSphere Infrastructure from Kubernetes, particularly via kubectl. For example, I might like to know some of the details about the master nodes and worker nodes (e.g. which ESXi host are they on?, how much resources are they consuming?). Also, if I have a persistent volume, how can I query which vSphere datastore is it on, which policy is it using, what is the path to the VMDK? Therefore I started…
After being asked about how vSphere Host Groups worked with Availability Zones in Enterprise PKS earlier this week, I decided to spend a little time setting it up in my lab and doing some testing to make sure I could understand the feature and its behaviour. Essentially what this feature allows you to do is to make use of the vSphere Host Group feature to group a bunch of ESXi hosts together. Then as one builds Availability Zones (commonly referred to AZs) in Enterprise PKS, a Host Group can be associated with an AZ. Anything that Enterprise PKS deploys to…
I have been doing quite a bit of work on First Class Disks (FCD), also known as Improved Virtual Disks (IVD) over the past number of months. One tool that has been extremely useful in improving my understanding of FCDs has been safekeeping, a tool developed by Max Daneri of VMware and which is now available to download on GitHub. If you did not know, FCDs are used extensively in VMware’s new Cloud Native Storage (CNS) offering that is currently available with vSphere/vSAN 6.7U3. Now, whilst the primary aim of this tool is to help backup vendors become familiar with…