Proud Speaker at VMware Explore

Recently I was fortunate enough to participate as a speaker in the VMware's prestigious forum VMware Explore 2023 (formerly VMworld). I presented a session along with my colleague Suresh T.

The session was about how customers can migrate large amount of workloads conveniently with careful planning and minimum impact to production workload.

It was a exciting to meet lot of known faces from the company and customers.

VCF on vCloud Director

This is however not a new topic and not the first time. Writing this for the people who have the vCloud Director based lab environments. I was talking to someone in my team on this and thought of doing this myself and share the experience through this blog. I will walk-through on how VCF can be deployed in the nested environment on a vAPP in the vCloud Director based environment.

Lets take a look at the diagram first and see what are we trying to do here,

 

As you can see above, we would have a vSphere environment with all components setup and on top of that there is a vCloud Director based infrastructure on which Users will create vAPPs consisting of VMs.

 

NSXT lab using Static Routes

In this post we will create NSX-T home lab using static routes. This is for my own reference, you can interprets these steps as per your requirements.

Bill of Material

1. vSphere 7.0 U1

2. NSX-T 3.1.x

3. VYos latest

4. vCloud Director 10.1

Network details

As you can notice above, I am using VyOS for VLANs and routing networks. Here are the networks in VyOS with their respective VLANs.

I am using single uplink for each network.

VCF 4.1 What's new?

 VCF 4.1 What's new?

Recently VMware released 4.1 VCF lets take a look what all new things were added (source: vmware.com)

The list is big and can be checked on the vmware VCF release notes site. I have just picked the ones I think are most commonly used and helpful in this release.

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Remote Clusters ROBO

VCF extends its capabilities to the ROBO and Edge sites with Remote Clusters. Now customers can enjoy the same consistent cloud operations in their core data center and edge/ ROBO sites.

ESXi Parallel Upgrade

Parallel upgrades reduce the overall time required to upgrade your environment. This enables the customer to update the ESXi software on multiple clusters in the management domain or a workload domain in parallel.

vRA Integration with Microsoft Azure

There are lot of articles and information already available around this topic. But I thought will do this myself in my way.

In this blog I will talk about deploy/manage Azure workload from vRealize automation Portal. This is not a very often seen used case in any organization but definitely something good to learn. I used MS Azure Public Cloud and vRA 7.3 for this blog. Similar thing can be achieved using Azure Stack as well, but I am yet to explore that option. vRA 7.2 is also fully supported for this.