After spending a bit of time tidying up cables in my rack, I figured I’d take the opportunity to write about my current setup. Here it is in all its glory: Not the greatest picture. From top to bottom: Here’s a diagram of how it’s all connected together. Not in the diagram is a UniFi … Read more
I’m not going to run any benchmarks as there’s plenty of information out there, but what I’m going to do is deploy VCF on a single MS-A2 and time it, I’ve included times for deploying onto a single NUC Extreme, as well as a single Xeon host for comparison. To keep things as fair as … Read more
I’ve been experimenting with VCF 9 in my homelab recently and I’ve been trying out some day 2 activities. Invariably, with homelabs you end up having to rebuild some (or all) of it as you experiment, and I found myself in that position. I do intend on writing a blog covering how my lab is … Read more
My homelab currently comprises of 3x Intel NUC Extremes (11th gen, 1x i9, 2x i7) along with 2x Xeon workstation based hosts. Whilst I like the NUCs, I’ve been wanting to replace the Xeon workstations. They started off in a Dell SFF workstation, but due to heat management issues I removed the CPUs and I’ve … Read more
I previously blogged about how you can get BGP working between a UDM-SE and NSX Edge. I wanted to revisit the topic as BGP is now built into the UDM itself as of GW firmware 4.1 I believe, and there is no requirement to visit the command line except to troubleshoot and verify. I also … Read more
I see quite a bit of confusion about this internally and with customers, so I figured I would write a quick blog post on the subject. Starting with HCX 4.9, you are able to active HCX Enterprise services using VCF Solution Licensing. To save you a little bit of reading, here is the TL;DR: If … Read more
HC 4.10 has just been released and with it come a whole host of excellent new features. You can read the release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-HCX/4.10/rn/vmware-hcx-410-release-notes/index.html In this post, I want to concentrate on what will be welcome to customers who operate their own private datacentres and have no use for encryption. Historically, the traffic between … Read more
HCX 4.9 brought some licensing changes as well as offline/dark site support. Whilst it is still possible to upgrade using the well-known approach in the UI, you are now able to download the upgrade bundles. Whilst this is the only option for Local sites, it’s possible to use it for Connected sites, which might be … Read more
HCX OS Assisted Migration is a migration method within HCX where we can move supported guest OS VMs from a Hyper-V or KVM environment. The process to do so is once you have a functioning Service Mesh, you download a Sentinel agent and then install it on the VMs in scope for migration. Shortly afterwards, … Read more
Part way through the HCX 4.5 release notes it mentions the above with the following note: “In HCX 4.5, HCX can be deployed within a single vCenter Server to enable the Bulk migration. This is useful for cluster-to-cluster migrations in environments where the vendor compatibility or other requirements for cluster-to-cluster vMotion cannot be satisfied“ This, … Read more