While designing a vSAN based platform for a customer lately, I was looking into NVMe based ReadyNodes which needed to run ESXi 6.7 U3. While looking for a specific Dell rackmount config in the VMware Compatibility Guide, something caught my interest. Those were the lines at the bottom of the Read more…
In January I attended the NSX-T 2.4 Install, Configure and Manager (ICM) course. The course itself was great and gave me thorough knowledge of the product. By attending the course, all pieces of the puzzle fell together and I was impressed with the product so far. Although NSX-T was not Read more…
In part 1 of this blog post, I wrote about the background of TLS. In this second part I show you how VCD (VMware Cloud Director) and often also the Load Balancer can be configured to enhance security, integrity and page speed. In this multi-part series I hope you benefit Read more…
The Let’s Encrypt certificate I use for the Cloud Director portal running in my lab environment expired lately, therefore a renewal was needed. While renewing the certificate and checking my TLS config, it was not up to par with modern standards and that needed for be fixed. While writing down Read more…
Todays topic is VMware Cloud Director inter-tenant routing with a NSX-T backed provider VDCs (pVDC). The reason for writing this post is that some use-cases require routed connectivity between Org VDCs that may or may not be part of the same Org. Due to the multi-tenant nature of VCD, most Read more…
In the second part of the Cloud Director tidbits series, I dive into the deployment of the VCD appliance using OVFtool. In hindsight I should have used it much sooner, since deploying the VCD OVA using the vSphere Client wizard is quite a hassle. Part one: Changing the sitename It Read more…
After the release of VMware Cloud Director 10.1 (yes, you read it correctly, the lowercase “v” is gone now), it was time to re-installed my lab environment a. Because of the new name, the acronym is now slightly different (VCD instead of vCD). During the re-install and config process I Read more…
The SSD tier in my lab became quite full in the beginning of this year, so the search began for some expansion. All 8 hot-swap slots in my single node lab server are occupied so, it needed to be an NVMe drive due to slot availability but mainly because of Read more…
The second part of this topic in the “vCloud Director Identity and Access Management” series touches the “per Org VDC” permission feature. I decided to split the topic into a multi-part series due to the length of the original one. The first part can be found using the link below: Read more…
Since a while now, customers show an increasingly interest in data-at-rest encryption. vSphere has build-in encryption features since the 6.5 version. I wrote this post to show how Equinix SmartKey can help implementing these encryption features without buying HSM appliances yourself. Since I started working with the SmartKey product, I Read more…