SDDC.Lab v6 Released
Slow and steady. That’s how I would describe the pace and progress around making SDDC.Lab version 6 the new default and recommended version of the project. If you’re not familiar with the SDDC.Lab project, it’s a collection of Ansible Playbooks that perform fully automated deployments of nested VMware Software Defined Data Center environments called pods. Each…
Quick Tip: NSX Advanced Load Balancer for vSphere Tanzu with NSX Networking
As of NSX version 4.1.1, NSX Advanced Load Balancer version 22.1.4, and vSphere with Tanzu version 8.0 Update 2 we have the option to leverage the NSX Advanced Load Balancer as the load balancer provider for new vSphere with Tanzu backed by NSX networking deployments. This deployment option is a very welcome addition knowing that…
NSX 4.1.2 – GRE Tunnels
NSX 4.1.2 introduces support for Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnels for Tier-0 gateways and Tier-0 VRF gateways offering another standards-based option for “plumbing” network paths that lead traffic into and out of the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). In today’s short article I’ll go over configuring a GRE tunnel in order to facilitate communication between two…
NSX 4.1.2 – IDS/IPS Packet Capture
A nice new feature that shipped with NSX 4.1.2 is the ability to download packet capture files (PCAPs) containing packets that were detected or prevented by NSX IDS/IPS. This enables teams to store and investigate network data related to intrusion attempts, outside of NSX and in a common format whenever that is required. Packet Capture…
Configuring DPU-Based Acceleration for NSX
Offloading the NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) to a Data Processing Unit (DPU) is an exciting new feature which is GA as of NSX version 4.1. Other NSX features that were already supported within DPU-based acceleration for NSX are: For NSX DFW, offloading and accelerating by a DPU means layer 4 traffic flows go through the…
NSX Application Platform – Installation Notes
A while back I needed to deploy the NSX Application Platform (NAPP) in my lab environment to demonstrate features like NSX Intelligence and the ones within NSX Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP). In my experience, deploying NAPP can be more or less of an undertaking depending largely on whether the prerequisites are in place and the…
BGP EVPN Between NSX And VyOS – Part 2
Welcome back! In Part 1 we configured and prepared NSX to participate in a BGP EVPN control and data plane. In this part we continue with configuration of the VyOS router. Once both NSX and VyOS are configured we’ll verify that everything is working as intended. Lab Overview The lab environment for this exercise consists…
BGP EVPN Between NSX And VyOS – Part 1
Recently I’ve been looking into setting up BGP EVPN between VMware NSX and VyOS router. I’m using VyOS quite a lot in labs and demos, often as the counterpart to a Tier-0 gateway, and wanted to find out if it was capable of a somewhat more advanced feature like BGP EVPN. It took some research…
NSX Distributed Firewall – How To Get Started?
One of the great benefits of the NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) is the flexibility it offers when it comes to developing security policy models. Implementation of the application intrinsic NSX DFW always begins with looking at the business needs and then continues with development of a security policy model aligned with those needs. On the…
SDDC.Lab v5 Released
Finishing touches and testing is completed. We’re proud to announce that we’ve just released SDDC.Lab Version 5! For those of you that are not familiar with the SDDC.Lab project, it’s a collection of Ansible Playbooks that perform fully automated deployments of nested VMware Software Defined Data Center Pods including solutions like vSphere, vSAN, and NSX.…
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