Having finally got some SSDs to be able to use my PernixPro/PernixPrime NFR license, I thought it was about time to get PernixData’s FVP 2.0 running in my lab again. I haven’t used FVP in my lab since it was running in beta, so I was keen to see the awesome new features in action. It really is an easy install process and took me less than an hour to get my cluster up and running with VMs I/O being accelerated.

As this was my first VMworld I am not ashamed to say I was really stoked about attending, many of my peers have attended in the past and were going to attend.

I flew in on the Sunday evening so that I could register early on Monday for partner day, however I did miss the chance to attend what turned out to be a very popular and very full Rockstar event on the Sunday evening.

I am aware that that’s not a catchy blog post title. In fact, it doesn’t even really describe the problem or solution very well - for that I need to go into a little bit more depth!

Suppose I have configured a Reservation with two Networks ticked (“192.168.1.0-VLAN1” and “192.168.10.0-VLAN10”). As you can see in the screenshot below, each of the networks has a Network Profile created and assigned with a network pool to provide IP addressing for the VMs.

*This post was meant to be published on Friday, VMworld Sleep Deprivation meant I didn’t click the button!*

This is the last post and a bit of a wrap up on my VMworld 2014 series!

There isn’t a keynote on day three, and there’s definitely a “winding down” feel as people tend to arrive later (if at all) and many are…feeling the effects of the previous night shall we say! That said, every session I wanted to attend was still fully booked and it was a case of queuing for the spare seats.

Day two of VMworld kicked off with a keynote session which traditionally includes demos of all that’s new. It was a well presented session with a glimpse into the sysadmin’s future with a demo of vCOps alerts popping up on Google glass. Since the sessions are available online I won’t go into detail, but it was worth a watch (if you didn’t watch the US one).

My morning consisted of preparations for the VCP NV (NSX) exam, which I detailed in a previous post. Very pleased to have passed what is a difficult exam.

It is with great relief that I can announce I have passed my VCP NV (Network Virtualisation) having been caught out by the difficulty of the exam and failing previously.

Exam Preparation

I was fortunate to attend a VMware internal bootcamp (roughly equivalent to the ICM course) for NSX and have had experience deploying production NSX environments, so that is by far the best preparation. As always, the exam blueprint is crucial, you *have* to know all areas covered there. I’ve also been reading the documentation and design and deploy guides published by VMware, and completed the basic and advanced hands on labs that are also freely available. On top of that there is the official practice exam which I strongly suggest you do as it reflects the real exam well, and there are a series of fantastic practice tests by Paul McSharry available while provide a decent test of knowledge.

After a bit of a rocky start (missed my flight and the partner day due to tendonitis in my knee) I arrived in Barcelona for my 2nd VMworld Europe. I headed straight from the airport to the PernixData party and caught up with the rest of the Xtravirt guys.

Tuesday morning started as ever with a keynote address. It was a little disappointing, but not unexpected, that there were no real announcements or reveals in the keynote. It was essentially a repeat of the VMworld US keynote with a couple of new betas announced. Nothing really revolutionary, a new vCloud Air datacenter in Germany and some new partners for EVO:RAIL. It’s interesting to see that the pace of traction for both cloud and hyperconverged is increasing for VMware’s portfolio though.

With the release of vCAC 6.1 there have been some great improvements in the setup of the clustered vCAC appliances - none of the previous copying of configuration files between appliances - just a simple wizard to do it all for you. In my opinion this is superb.

You’ll need to have deployed a load balancer of some sort - vCAC 6.0 build-out to distributed model – Part 3.1: Configure Load Balancing with vCNS or vCAC 6.0 build-out to distributed model – Part 3.2: Configure load balancing with NSX

SSO is a fundamental requirement when deploying vCAC, whether for a distributed or simple installation. This walk through goes through the deployment and configuration of the vCAC Identity Appliance, which provides a stand alone SSO instance for vCAC.

Some of the posts in this series are completed with vCAC 6.0.1, others will be with 6.1. Where there are differences I will aim to point them out!

The NSX Edge Gateway comes pre-armed with the ability to provide an SSL VPN for remote access into your network. This isn’t a new feature (SSL VPN was available in vCloud Networking and Security), but it’s worth a run through. I’m configuring remote access to my Lab, since it’s often useful to access it when on a client site, but traditional VPN connections are often blocked on corporate networks where HTTPS isn’t.