So the quarter rack came in, and it’s exactly as advertised. Good machining, the front and sides are both vented and removable. The removable hinges feel solid and not easily breakable. The front locking mechanism isn’t *great*, but that’s not a concern in my environment. It came with casters & leveling feet which were very… Read More »
I thought it would be worthwhile to document how my lab is setup for the basis of these NSX blogs. Here is a quick diagram of how the lab currently looks, it being actually two labs across two locations so that I can test the various VPN and other cross site functionalities in the product.… Read More »
So I’m working on beefing up the home lab a little bit and I realized that I didn’t have a great place to put everything. Ok, full disclosure, I’ve known for a while now that I’ve needed a place, but I’ve been too cheap to spend the $400+ for a quarter rack. I’ve been getting… Read More »
I have been a big fan of OpenSSL on the Linux platform, and have used it for many years to set up encrypted site-to-site VPN connections between locations. This usually entails me settings up a CentOS server at each location, dropping the latest rev of OpenSSL on each, and setting up the connections via hub… Read More »
In this post, I will be covering the process of upgrading NSX 6.1.4 to the newly released version 6.2.0. The lab requiring the update is running vCenter 5.5 Build 2442329, with two ESXi hosts running 5.5 U2 Build 2638301. Most of the really cool improvements I saw at VMworld 2015 surrounding version 6.2 (cross site… Read More »
Since vSphere 4.1 VMware has stated that for high Storage I/O VMs you should be using the Paravirtual (PVSCSI) controller, there are several deep dives into this topic so I won’t re-cover them here. LSI is used by default in Windows installs so unless you install the drivers using the floppy disk at the initial Windows… Read More »
I was reading Mark Achtemichuk’s (VCDX #50) article “Does corespersocket Affect Performance?” And decided to do some experimenting on my own. As we have a lot of monster VMs (VMs over 8 vCPU) we’ve known that turning off CPU Hotplug (which enables vNUMA awareness) is beneficial in our environment. After reading Mark’s article I wanted… Read More »
Here is the step by step process for adding the ability to authenticate via Active Directory (AD) to your vROps environment. Click on the Administration button: LDAP Import Sources: Add a new import source: Input the appropriate information: Click the test button to confirm that it works 😉 Confirm that you can import users from… Read More »
So this was a bit tougher than I expected 🙂 In a previous post I gathered together all of the official blueprint material into one zip file for ease of study, so read that obviously ;-). I also read Mastering VMware vSphere 6 by Nick Marshall (highly recommended) and I *still* had to take it… Read More »
The SSL VPN service for remote client connections is a pretty cool feature of the NSX Edge Gateway. The service can be setup to granularly allow specific internet networks to be presented back to the connecting client, can be configured to authenticate against AD/LDAP, and is all around a much easier approach than configuring SSH… Read More »