Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer

April 11, 2021 Chris Noon 5

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer Thanks to Siegfried Huijgen I ended up receiving a lot of attention on the 5 part series, which spun off into a request for a part 6 on Avi Networks Load Balancing. While the other posts have focused on security, it makes perfect sense to include the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Networks) into the mix of complementary services for VDI’s. For the remainder of the post please […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.

March 16, 2021 Chris Noon 5

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer The final post of this series will be around NSX IDS (Intrusion Detection System) and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). Both these products are used to highlight attacks targetted around a VMware environment. While the dFW does a great job of providing zero trust access, what if someone tries to take advantage of that open access? This is the use case for IDS/IPS. IDS and IPS used to be […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.

February 28, 2021 Chris Noon 5

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer Unfortunately, this post will be more of a theoretical one. I don’t have access to any introspection service providers. That said, I think it is something that should be discussed as it adds huge benefits. If any partner out there is reading this and wants to give me a trial of their product, I’m happy to write a Part 4.5 of this series. Introspection Services Concepts. Introspection services […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.

January 29, 2021 Chris Noon 5

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer Before I start. Shout out to Bilal Ahmed, a fellow vMusketeer who helped me with this post. In this part of the series, we will look into IDFW (Identity Firewalling). IDFW is becoming an increasingly popular feature in VDI and RDSH environments. It allows security constructs to be applied to AD (Active Directory) groups, rather than the IP addresses. This promotes ease of mobility and reduction of operational […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.

January 3, 2021 Chris Noon 5

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer I started the series discussing the different features within NSX that can complement a VDI environment. I’ll focus on dFW today, a well-known NSX feature. Recap: East/West Traffic between VDI’s. dFW, one of NSX’s well known and most marketable features, with good reason. Many attacks don’t target the motherload first time, but rather something lightly protected (think webserver) and then move laterally within the DC to something of […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX.

November 26, 2020 Chris Noon 6

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a number of customers that are keen to see how NSX can complement their existing or new VDI environment(s). N.B. I say VDI a lot in this article, but it applies to both VDI and RDSH. As soon as this discussion starts my mind leaps into distributed Firewalling, Identity Firewalling, Introspection Services and Intrusion Detection/Prevention Services. I think it’s […]

Backing up and restoring the vROps configuration from the API

October 16, 2020 Kim Bottu 1

As of vROps 8.2 there is a new king in town to backup and restore your vROps configuration from the API. Here is a quick look into this new feature. As all of us are aware, backing up vROps configuration prior to vROps 8.2 is quite painful. You have to export dashboards, reports, views and super metrics, separately. Other things like the metric configuration, you have to copy to a text file if you want to be able to restore it. But now in vROps 8.2 you can export all configuration in a single zip file. I won’t go into much detail about backing up and restoring from the UI, it is quite self-explanatory. Just be aware that when you […]

What is new for vRealize Cloud Management at VMworld 2020

September 29, 2020 Kim Bottu 1

There is a bunch of new stuff to be announced by the CMBU at VMworld 2020. Here are some highlights: vRealize Cloud Universal: A flexible hybrid SaaS Suite offering which delivers a comprehensive Multi-cloud Management on a subscription basis. The following products will be offered as a bundled version: vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation, vRealize Log Insight 8.2, vRealize AI and VMware Skyline. Take note that some of the products can be run in a hybrid fashion, making moving to the cloud easier. The subscription based licensing will come in three different flavors: Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. But, should you opt for the VMware vCloud Suite subscription, you will get VMware vRealize Cloud AND vSphere Enterprise Plus! The different SaaS Capabilities […]