Getting started with VCF Part 14 – Connecting vRA to NSX-T WLD (alternate method)

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…

Getting started with VCF Part 13 – Connect vRealize to WLDs

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…

Getting started with VCF Part 12 – NSX Manager Backups

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…

Getting started with VCF Part 11 – External Storage

I got an interesting question recently on my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) blog series. An observation was made that all of my posts highlighted vSAN as the storage for both the management domain and the workload domains. The question was whether other types of storage could be used in VCF. While we would always promote vSAN as the primary storage for VCF, the answer is yes, other storage types can be used. But I need to qualify this statement. The management domain always uses vSAN. This is automatically configured during the bring up process of the management domain and provides…

Getting started with VCF Part 10 – Kubernetes deployment

With Enterprise PKS deployed in a Workload Domain in VMware Cloud Foundation, we now come to the point where we can begin to create Kubernetes clusters and deploy some containerized applications. We need access to some tooling to achieve this. One option is to SSH onto the Operations Manager appliance, as it has many of the necessary tools already installed. However, I prefer to do this in my own management/jump desktop rather than use components that are part of the actual product. In this post, I will show you the steps to get setup with the required tool-set, deploy your…

Getting started with VCF Part 9 – PKS deployment

We are nearing the end of our journey with Getting Started with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). In this post, we will go through the deployment of Enterprise PKS v1.5 on a Workload Domain created in VCF v3.9. We’ve been through a number of steps to get to this point, all of which can be found here. Now we have some of the major prerequisites in place, notably NSX-T Edge networking and PKS Certificates, so we can proceed with the Enterprise PKS deployment. However, there are still a few additional prerequisites needed before we can start. Let’s review those first of…

NSX-T Edge T0 Router: Static Route + SNAT instead of BGP

If you been following my adventures of deploying Enterprise PKS 1.5 on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 3.9, you will be aware that I spent a considerable amount of time establishing Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peering between my NSX-T Edge T0 Logical Router and my physical Upstream Router as documented in this post. This allows them to exchange route information, so that when one of my internal overlay networks needs to communicate externally, it can do so. However, I am in the fortunate position where I can access my Upstream Router and make any necessary BGP configuration changes to allow it…