July 2016 -

Journey to VCIX-NV – Part 2 – Deploying and Editing NSX Controllers Settings

July 26, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

The next components to deploy are the NSX Controllers. These are the main components of the NSX Platform Control Plane. NSX Controllers can be deployed as a single instance (not recommended for production) or in a cluster of three nodes. They’re deployed by the NSX Manager itself, with just few clicks in the NSX Manager GUI. For lab environments, you can deploy just a single instance of the NSX Controller and you will be fine. If you want to deploy three of them, you might hit a problem with resource contention, because it requires 4 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and 2 GB RAM Reservation by default and you can’t edit the VM Settings. I found a blog post of Tom Fojta about downsizing NSX Controllers (In […]

Journey to VCIX-NV – Intro

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

This is my series regarding my journey towards VCIX-NV. This series is not about giving you a full hands-on guide for the exam as many have already done this well, but this is only about adding more remarks about the lab issues and other useful resources. For those who don’t know VCIX-NV is a practical-lab certification for VMware NSX. To be able to pass the exam you will need a home-lab or some old servers at work which have been setup with vSphere and NSX so you can get your hands dirty. This is just an introduction I will list my used resources, my home lab configuration and a short description of what my virtual lab is gonna be like. Used Resources: VMware […]

Journey to VCIX-NV – Part 1 – Deploying NSX Manager on VMware Workstation

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

The VMware NSX Manager is the first component you have to deploy. The NSX Manager represents the Management Plane of this platform and enables you to use the NSX Platform. Usually the NSX Manager is deployed by importing OVA File on vCenter Server or ESXi Host. When you follow the installation wizard for OVA/OVF it allows you to add network information, an admin account password and a Privileged CLI password. As described in my intro post, and for my lab purposes I have deployed the NSX Manager directly in VMware Workstation. However, VMware Workstation doesn’t allow you to enter this information and hence you will have to manually edit it using the CLI on the NSX Manager itself. First, import the OVA File downloaded from […]

Bootstrap a Single-node VSAN Cluster under Running vCenter Server

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

In my NSX Lab, I needed a single-node cluster with VSAN enabled beside another normal cluster with three nodes. William Lam has a genius post about how to bootstrap a single-node VSAN cluster to add your vCenter on it in your lab, but unfortunately even though his advice works perfectly when you have a single ESXi host, it does not work well when you already have a vCenter in place. My story begins from the VSAN Default Storage Policy. This policy enforces that a deployment of VMs needs to have: Failures to Tolerate set to 1 (FTT =1 ): That means that the minimum number of nodes has to be 3 nodes and each VM disk has to be configured in RAID-1. Number of disk stripes=1: […]

VCAP-DCD6 Just Went GA

July 22, 2016 Jason Grierson 0

Hey All So many of you have been waiting for the new VCAP6 line to launch it seems some of the exams went GA yesterday. The newly renamed DCD6 – VCAP6-DCV Design has gone GA and information around it can be found here: https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=88743&ui=www_cert However it seems they are still working out some registration issues as when I tried to register it wasn’t showing up on Pearson Vue’s site. So hopefully this will get squared away shortly. Once I have a chance to sit the exam I will hard at work on developing new material for the DCD simulator 2.0 along with some new documentation to go along with it. I look forward to getting this new material out there […]

VCAP6-DCV Deployment Beta

July 18, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So myself and Kim did this exam the other day. Kim hasn’t done any DCA style exam before, and he had a similar experience to me on my first go. It kind of hits you like a train and its a lot to take in initially. The beta signup period didn’t give anyone much time to actually prep for it properly. Having done the 5.5 DCA, I remember looking at some of the questions and wondering what they were wanting……exactly. I did what I thought was correct, you don’t have time to second guess yourself, you just get on with it and do what you can. The best explanation for the DCA/Deployment exam is: Imagine you are a contractor and […]

VMworld 2016

July 15, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

For the last couple of years I have been fortunate enough to be able to attend VMworld. Luckily enough for me my managers see the value in me attending VMworld. I know a lot of employers think employees want to attend for the after parties and all that, will be drunk most of the evenings, hungover in the daytime and attending barely 10 % of the sessions you said you want to attend. But from the first time I have attended VMworld in 2012 I have come to realize some things: The total amount of money I spend for VMworld is way less than the costs for the offical ICM course which comes in at 3600 Euros + VAT in Belgium and at the […]

REVIEW: Learning VMware NSX Book by Ranjit Singh Thakurratan

July 11, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

This book is one of the first books about VMware NSX 6.2. Being to the point and not too big a book, this book is really one of the resources you should have in your library if you’re using VMware NSX. Let us have a quick look at the book contents This book has nine chapters: Chapter 1: An introduction into Network Virtualization concepts and NSX-V. It also includes the only current (albeit inofficial) reference for NSX 6.2 Configuration Maximums. Chapter 2: An introduction into NSX components which is a simple and smooth entrance to the world of VMware NSX. This includes also a good explanation of the VXLAN concepts. It also gives an overview of the much anticipated new feature: Cross-vCenter NSX. Chapter 3: This chapter explains […]