Back in April I published a post about my GitHub repository containing Ansible scripts that perform automated deployment of nested vSphere/NSX-T lab environments. A lot has happened during the last 5 months and now that we’re close to making version 2 the default branch, I thought it would be a good time to give you…
And now something completely different. Recently, while working on a project, I had to come up with a way to automate Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM installations on vSphere. Utilizing Ubuntu’s new autoinstall method together with some Ansible code I managed to get something up and running. Decent enough to share it with you. Overview The…
Read more Automate Ubuntu Server 20.04 Installation with Ansible
Some weeks ago I introduced you to my GitHub repository containing a set of Ansible playbooks helping people deploy a highly customizable vSphere 6.7/7.0 with NSX-T 2.5/3.0 nested lab environment. As I mentioned in the “launch” post, this project is a work in progress and during the last couple of weeks I’ve been spending many…
Read more Nested vSphere and NSX-T Deployed With Ansible – April Update
Welcome back! I’m in the process of setting up NSX-T in a stretched cluster environment. In part 1 I deployed the NSX manager cluster and configured the ESXi hosts as NSX transport nodes. The N-VDS was installed on the ESXi hosts and their vmkernel adapters migrated from the VDS to the N-VDS. In this second…
A stretched cluster architecture facilitates for higher levels of availability and things like inter-site load balancing. It’s a common multisite solution and also part of VMware’s Validated Design for SDDCs with multiple availability zones. Traditionally compute networking in an active-active multisite setup has had its challenges, but with vSAN storage and NSX networking technologies that’s…
Welcome back! In part two we deployed the data plane for the East-West traffic in our cross-vCenter NSX environment. In this part we continue with the setting up the components for the North-South traffic. Current state A quick look at the current state of our cross-vCenter NSX lab environment. The management plane and the control…
One of those scenarios where the NSX platform really shines is in multi-site environments. Here NSX together with vSphere is the infrastructure that delivers on business requirements like workload mobility, resource pooling, and consistent security. Since NSX version 6.2 we can roll out NSX in a vSphere environment managed by more than one vCenter system.…
After you prepared your vSphere clusters for VXLAN you’re eager to start building your SDDC network. You provision some logical switches, a distributed logical router and maybe even an edge services gateway. Before you know it you are doing full-fledged network virtualization. It’s simple enough, right? But then you realize you still have other virtual…
Recently I had to do a quick demo on the NSX-V logical load balancer. Setting up the NSX components in a small lab for such demo is a pretty straight-forward process. I thought I’d walk you through setting this up in case you want to play around with the logical load balancer or any of…
