2020 – The year of my #VCDX Journey!

In June 2017 I joined the company ITQ Consultancy in the Netherlands. A VMware knowledge POWERHOUSE! Back then I only held a VCP5-DCV certification which was almost expiring, and up to that point, I mainly worked with compute and storage infrastructures.

When I joined ITQ  my primary goal for the first year was getting more knowledge on the networking part within IT and especially getting familiar with the Software-Defined Network solution of VMware; NSX for vSphere.  My secondary goal was achieving a double VCIX status (DCV and NV) within one year after I started at ITQ.

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Named Teaming Policy in NSX-T 2.5 – Load Balancing Deep Dive

I’m working on an NSX-T 2.5 design for a customer. Since there are some changes with the load balancing options and design scenarios for Edge Node VMs and N-VDS, I first wanted to know what was changed, and how did it work.

Named Teaming Policies is a feature in that was introduced in NSX-T 2.3 and since NSX-T  2.4 a N-VDS can have multiple Named Teaming Policies attached. This section becomes now even more interesting since the NSX-T Edge Node recommended design has changed with NSX-T 2.5. See this blogpost from Rutger Blom to gain more information about this change.

In this blogpost I’m only focusing on the load balancing part itself when you make use of multiple teaming policies and not how to configure it.

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Using BGP with VMware Enterprise PKS and NSX-T

I recently started investing some time into the ”cool kid stuff’; VMware Enterprise PKS, and Kubernetes. I started with reading some blogs, watching some video’s online and reading official documentation. After a while, I started deploying PKS in my lab and tried to integrate it with NSX-T. The blogs I was using were not talking about dynamic routing at all, only doing static routes. Even the Pivotal documentation set is not mentioning BGP setup in that much detail. Only for the Multi-Tenant PKS deployments. I’m not talking about other dynamic routing protocols because NSX-T only supports BGP.

Most of the times customers who are deploying PKS or considering PKS are running dynamic routing protocols in their environments. Therefore, I’m writing this blog to share how I did my BGP setup within NSX-T and PKS, and then specifically for the route redistribution part. (more…)

Physical IP and DNS mapping with vRealize Network Insight

vRealize Network Insight is the must-have tool to gain visibility into all your network flows in your infrastructure. When adding vCenter Servers as data sources in vRNI it can map VM names and IP addresses. As in almost every environment, there are running physical workloads as well. Those names are not being recognized or mapped by vRNI and show only the IP address in the flows.

For every human being, except for the hard-core networking guys 😉 it is easier to view flows by hostnames instead of IP addresses. Therefore, vRNI provide you the possibility to map A records to IP addresses. In this blog post, I will explain how to do this with the help of a PowerShell script. (more…)