Category: SDDC [en]

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NSX Manager – Changing Certificates

After installing NSX-T Data Center, the NSX managers and cluster use self-signed certificates. These can and should be replaced with trusted certificates from an enterprise CA. The new certificates can be imported into the UI of the NSX Manager. Unfortunately, replacement is done exclusively via an API call. This can usually be done nicely with utilities such as Postman. However, there are environments that are very restrictive and in which neither an application such as Postman is available nor any other Linux system from which the API calls could be issued.

We will outline how we can do this without any special utilities using only the CURL command directly from the NSX Manager appliance.

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Remediate vSAN Policy ‘Out of Date’

Every object in vSAN (OSA) has an assigned storage policy. If no custom policies have been defined, objects are assigned the factory-installed vSAN default policy. Compliance of the selected policy with the current state is checked regularly. If the object is compliant with the assignes policy, the compliance status is set to ‘Compliant’.

However, it can happen that several objects in the cluster show the compliance status ‘Out of Date’. This will be shown in Skyline Health as an informative note. In the example below, several VMs with their vDisks were out of date.

Remediation in vSphere-Client

If there is only one or very few objects, the affected VM can be highlighted in Skyline Health. By doing so, we switch to the context of this VM and we can see details about namespace-object (VM Home) or the vDisks under Configuration > Policies. In the dialog (image below) we can select the object and click on ‘Reapply VM Storage Policy’. Usually this is enough to bring all objects of the VM back to the ‘Compliant’ state.

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Project Arctic – Delivering Benefits of the Cloud to On-Prem Workloads

In the last few years we’ve seen a clear trend to adopt cloud strategies on customer side. Some already pusue a multi cloud strategy to get the most benefit from different offerings. But we may not forget, that infrastructure on-premises – the so called private cloud – is still the most common kind of virtual infrastructure. This is no surprise because on-premises infrastructure has without doubt some advantages. It’s not alone aspects of data privacy, data security and data sovereignty. There are also performance aspects such as low latency that keep customers from migration special workloads to the (public) cloud.

On the other hand there are some advantages of cloud offerings too. Such as flexible consumption, minimal maintenance, built in resilience, developer agility and the possibility to manage from anywhere.

To bridge the gap between on-premises needs and cloud based offerings, VMware has announced Project Arctic during VMworld 2021. Delivering benefits of the cloud to on-premises workloads.

Introducing vSphere+ and vSAN+

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VMware Validated Design Guide (VVD) discontinued

Anyone who has ever been involved in the design of IT concepts based on VMware products should be familiar with the VMware Validated Design Guide (VVD).

VMware Validated Design is a collection of data center design recommendations that span compute, storage, networking, and management which can be used as a reference guide for implementing a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). The VVD documentation consists of a series of documents that build on each other for all stages of the SDDC lifecycle. The VVD documentation can be used as an extension of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) documentation. Each version of the VVD Guide correlates with a particular VCF version.

VMware Validated Design has been discontinued after VMware Validated Design 6.2 and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2. VMware Validated Solutions (VVS) will take over the succession of VVD.

VMware Validated Solutions

VMware Validated Solutions are validated technical implementations designed to assist in building a secure and stable infrastructure based on VCF. Each VVS includes a detailed design with design decisions, as well as implementation instructions. VMware Cloud Foundation SDDC Manager is required to implement VMware Validated Solutions.

Finally, this means that anyone interested in a VMware validated solution in the future needs to take a look at VCF.