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…
This past week, my buddy Paudie and I have been neck-deep in Cloudera/Hadoop, with a view to getting it successfully deployed on vSphere. The purpose of this was solely a learning exercise, to try to understand what operational considerations need to be taking into account when running Hadoop on top vSphere. These operational considerations range from items such as maintenance mode, rack awareness, high availability, replication and protection of the data. Both Cloudera/Hadoop and vSphere offers ways to do all of this, so the longer term objective is to figure out whether or not these features are compatible, and whether…
Today VMware has another cloud launch update, and this one is significant for many reasons. Our underlying goals of VMware Cloud are many. From an infrastructure perspective, the goal is to provide operational consistency no matter where the application is running, whether this is from an automation, security or governance perspective. But one thing that is often overlooked is what this operational consistency means to the developer. The goal, I feel, is to make it as simple as possible for developers to create their apps and make it as simple as possible to consume services that they might need for…
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to many readers that virtualization has brought (and continues to bring) huge benefits with regards to data center efficiency. I’m sure you are all aware of how virtualization allows you to do more with your servers; no more single server – single application paradigms. No longer do you have huge amount of compute resources left idle on your servers. By being able to run many operating systems and many applications simultaneously on the same single server (server consolidation), virtualization brought a halt to server sprawl and data center expansion for many of…
Some time ago, I wrote about which policy changes can trigger a rebuild of an object. This came up again recently, as it was something that Duncan and I covered in our VMworld 2017 session on top 10 vSAN considerations. In the original post (which is over 3 years old now), I highlighted items like increasing the stripe width, growing the read cache reservation (relevant only to hybrid vSAN) and changing FTT when the read cache reservation is non-zero (again only relevant to hybrid vSAN) which led to a rebuild of the object (or components within the object). The other…
Last week, I had the pleasure to attend our CTO Ambassadors conference, hosted by our Global Field CTO Chris Wolf. This was an excellent week, especially for someone like me who works directly for a single business unit at VMware. It gave me great insight into the activities going on in our other business units at VMware. One of the highlights for me was our “Serverless” night, where I finally got an opportunity to learn about Serverless, Functions As A Service (FaaS), AWS Lambda and all that other stuff that I kept hearing about, but did not quite fully understand.…