Bilal Ahmed, Author at

HCX 4.8 What’s New?! Selectable Mesh! #HCX #VMware #Migrations

November 22, 2023 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, it has been a while since I have blogged anything. Life is busy and HCX has been slowly improving with every release of the product. Now with 4.8, there is a big change which has been asked for by many customers and by us internally for a while. The chance to use multiple service meshes within the same cluster! Now let’s rewind slightly If you had a service mesh going from one source cluster to another, that has always been supported. If you had one source cluster that wanted to go to 2 or more destination clusters, that was fully supported with multiple HCX Service meshes. It was called the One to Many approach: In the diagram below, this […]

Creating #VMConAWS #NSX-T Firewall Rules and Segments with #PowerCLI

June 6, 2022 Bilal Ahmed 0

Well hello there. I had a customer that was wanting to do some work using scripting to create NSX-T segments and DFW rules in VMConAWS, for their PROD SDDC and for their new VCDR SDDC. Over the years I have seen a lot of people think that copying the VM data and being able to recover is the hard part when that can be the easiest part. Things like VCDR are designed to get your copies of the VMs up and running, but what about the networking and firewall rules you need to ensure communication works and is still secure? So, this ended up being a discussion on the various ways to create rules on both SDDCS and this led […]

Migrate VMs using #HCX #OSAM and #PowerCLI

April 4, 2022 Bilal Ahmed 0

Let’s talk about OSAM So “Operating System Assisted Migration”, can be used when you have Enterprise level HCX licensing. In the HCX Connector you have to download the OS agent which then you install onto the guest operating system: Once you have downloaded it locally, you can then copy it into the guest OS and install it, it then communicates back to the Sentinel Gateway Appliance and is picked up by the HCX Manager as you can see in the above screenshot. Now this is a good time to plug my co-workers’ blog https://www.chrisdooks.com/2022/02/24/automating-the-hcx-osam-sentinel-agent-install-via-sccm/ He discusses how to push the sentinel agent out via SCCM for Windows machines, which is much better than manually copying it across to various Windows […]

Lets Talk About Protecting and Recovering VMs with #VCDR #vExpert

December 6, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

So now we have deployed and configured VCDR, now we can go into all the bits that allow you to protect your VMs and failover! Protection Groups So now we can get into the nitty-gritty of starting to create Protection Groups and Recovery Plans. This is the meat of it all, where you define what is going to be protected and how it should be recovered. As you can see you can define how VMs are added to the protection group by using Naming Patterns, Tags or VM Folders. In this example I have used vSphere Tags: In my vCenter you can see I have created a tag specifically for VCDR to use: Then we can look at the various […]

Let’s talk about configuring and deploying VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery #VCDR #vExpert

November 22, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, let’s talk about VCDR VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. It was acquired from Datrium and I have some customers who are in the process of looking into it and deploying it. If you have ever used SRM, you will feel very at home with VCDR, as you will see as I explain it in more detail. I am a big fan of DR in general, I used to work for a BC/DR provider, and I lost count of the number of times people never tested their plans and were then surprised they didn’t work as they had hoped. I always used to say, you should be happy they failed now, imagine if this had been real and you couldn’t recover! […]

Automating HCX Cutover using PowerCLI #HCX #PowerCLI #vExpert

November 15, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I was provided with a script from my buddy Charlie at Tower Associates, and then myself and Dean Lewis edited it a bit to make it work alongside the scripts we had already produced in our previous posts. I’ve always been an advocate of doing the cutover manually. Cutting over 200 VMs or so in one go is daunting and lacks the control I would personally like. I like to be able to tell customers, ok we have cut over these 20 VMs for this app, please get them to test it, then when they are happy move to the next set. It is nice and controlled and instils confidence in the migration process. That is not to say […]

HCX DR Use Cases #HCX #DR #vExpert

November 8, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

*These are my own ramblings and nothing I say is officially supported by VMware!* So HCX does have a DR feature. It does not get talked about much, because at VMware if you are talking fully-fledged DR you will be looking into SRM and the new offering VCDR. The HCX DR service uses vSphere Replication (VR) under the hood in the same way, SRM can use vSphere Replication. The main difference is that the IX appliance in the service mesh is the vSphere Replication Manager. SRM does full-on DR orchestration, failing over VMs in a specific order, with recovery plans, HCX does not do any of that. When I have talked to GSS and some customers, I have discovered that […]

SDDC to SDDC Migrations #VMConAWS #HCX #Migrations

November 1, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 2

So I had a customer recently that had deployed a VMConAWS SDDC using a /23 subnet. This is fully supported, but they then ran into scalability issues as that subnet is limited to only allow 27 ESXi hosts. So now they wanted to scale beyond that but were stopped by this configuration limit. Now you can’t adjust that post-deployment, so this lead to a discussion about standing up a new SDDC and migrating to it or migrating into an existing SDDC that uses /20 subnet. Now there are 2 supported ways to do that using HCX and I am going to discuss both of them. I have 2 SDDCs : TF_TEST and SDDC-Jeff (great names I know!) Option 1: Deploy […]