Last night I was working in an environment that has a reasonably well locked down NSX distributed firewall, and I was having some issues with PowerCLI. PowerCLI 10.2 on Windows, connecting to vCenter Server 6.7, to be specific. Port 443 was allowed from the jump host to vCenter Server, but I was seeing some odd issues still. I was trying to run an as built report for the environment, but I could not seem to establish a connection to NSX manager when running the script, and VUM cmdlets that are called in the script were also failing, such as:

Well, that rolled around quickly. I remember booking the flights, accommodation and registration for VMware’s flagship VMworld event months ago and I’m now writing this from the plane about half way through the 27 hour journey from my home in Tasmania, Australia, to Las Vegas. This isn’t going to be a post on my recommendations, tips and tricks, or “how to attend if you aren’t attending”. There are lots of resources out there for this content and I urge you to go and read some of the blogs by others as there are some really great pointers!

Disclaimer: Vembu are a sponsor of Virtual Tassie and this post is a sponsored blog post. This post has been written in my own words and is not a direct redistribution of a blog post written by Vembu. With that said, I am new to the Vembu suite and have not had time since taking them on as a sponsor to use all aspects of their solution, so some of the content above has been comprised using information from Vembu’s website.

Recently I was playing around with NSX-V in the lab and getting myself more familiar with the automation options available. During the deployment of one of my environments, I couldn’t get the NSX Controllers to come up without failing. NSX Manager would deploy the controller VM, but it sat in a “deploying” state for around 45 minutes and then failed with a message “no route to host”. I checked out the console of one of the controllers directly after deployment and as soon as it booted up it went to the following GRUB boot loader screen:

That title is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s Friday night and that’s the best I’ve got! I was recently working through some recovery scenarios for NSX in the lab, as I was interested to understand what the process was for various scenarios such as: Losing NSX Manager and restoring Losing NSX Manager, DLR and ESG’s and restoring Losing the entire cluster (including ESXi hosts) and restoring NSX manager in to a new cluster The third scenario is reasonably obscure, and I’m not sure if you would follow a different restore process than what I did if this did actually happen.

This one will be a quick post, but I wanted to alert people to a new minor but useful feature that’s included in the vCenter 6.7 appliance, which is the ability to schedule backups natively within the appliance management interface. If you wanted to schedule an appliance based backup in 6.5, you would have to schedule a task to do so. Thankfully this was made easier by Brian Graf’s script, but now we have a way to build this in to the appliance configuration with no reliance on an external script.

[toc] Introduction Starting from VMworld US 2017, VMware announced their plans to support PSC replication and Enhanced Linked Mode with the vCenter Embedded deployment model, simplifying overall deployment and management requirements for a multi-vCenter environment. This feature is now included in the release of vSphere 6.7. In this post, I go over a little history for common deployment models, as well as what the new “vCenter Embedded Linked Mode” brings to the table.

It’s back, finally! A new feature with vCenter 6.7 is the ability to repoint a vCenter Server to another Platform Services Controller node, that resides in an entirely different vSphere SSO domain. This functionality is huge for domain consolidation, and also domain splitting (which admittedly is a less required use case from what I’ve seen, but something that still can be a useful use case). Edit: As per a comment from Rupak, I believe this feature is only available on the vCenter Server Appliance and is not available for the Windows deployment of vCenter 6.

Well, it’s that time of the year again. The VMware User Group (VMUG) UserCon’s are on again this week in Sydney (Tuesday 20th March) and Melbourne (Thursday 22nd March), Australia. VMUG UserCon is a free day long event filled with a few keynotes, breakout sessions, networking and checking out the exhibit hall. I’ve personally only attended one UserCon, which I wrote about here, but I was really impressed at the organisation and presence from VMware, sponsors and community members.

On Friday the 9th of March (morning of Saturday the 10th in Australia), VMware announced the results of the vExpert 2018 award, which is given to those who have performed various VMware advocacy related activities in the 2017 calendar year. I’m happy to say that VMware has deemed me worthy to be a vExpert again, which will mean this is my second year in the program. It’s a great program to be a part of with several perks, one of the most valuable (yet sometimes time consuming!