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DISCLAIMER: During VMworld 2018 US (Las Vegas), I was invited as a delegate to the Tech Field Day Extra (TFDx) event. I was not compensated in any way, my conference pass was complimentary as I was a speaker at the event and other expenses were covered by my employer, Parallo. I’m not required to write this blog post, I chose to do so of my own accord. This blog post is aimed to summarise the presentation that I was present for and also to provide some additional information about the company or solution presented on, which is all based on my opinion. ...

Next week the “ANZ” vForum event will be held once again in Sydney, Australia. The conference is returning to Sydney’s Luna Park where is was held 4 years ago in 2014 (from memory to celebrate a 10 year milestone of sorts), and that event was also my first vForum. vForum is also returning as a two day event after the format was changed last year to a one day event. I’m honestly not sure what the feedback was around it being a one day event, but VMware adjusting it back to two days speaks for itself. ...

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! This post, in all honesty, is just a bit of a rambling from me as I sit on the plane and reflect on the lack of blog posting recently, though this is good reason for that (below). ...

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. But this is what labs are for, right? ...

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. I also compare a couple of topologies between vSphere 6.0/6.5 and vSphere 6.7 to show the savings in the amount of nodes and in some cases, the complexity, that can be saved by using this new deployment topology. ...

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 6.7. With that said, hopefully if you are running vCenter 6.7 you are now running the appliance, as you have likely had several chances to migrate to the VCSA either using the migration tool, or manually (albeit with plenty of scripts to assist with the move of config and workloads). ...