NSX/VCNS

@vaficionado) – if that list of names doesn’t fill you with confidence for vRA.Next, then I suggest you follow them on twitter and trust me that it’s a crack team!

So, my highlights:

1. Completely automated deployment…almost. The deployment of appliances and installation of IaaS components and pre-requisites will be wizard driven, the Window Servers will need to exist and have an agent installed, and the MSSQL server will also need to be installed. Anyone who’s done a distributed vRA install will know that this is a massive improvement over the current state of affairs.
2. The vRealize Automation appliances will be clustered automatically for core services such as identity, cafe (portal), vPostgres and embedded vRealize Orchestrator (Embedded vRO is now recommended for production).
3. A new identity service. No more vSphere SSO or PSC – VMware Identity Management (vIDM) is a new, highly scalable and performing federated identity platform. Any SAML identity source, and more than 3m users supported per source.
4. An initial setup wizard that creates your first tenant, configuring things like fabric groups, business groups and vSphere endpoints automatically. It will even import your existing vSphere templates as clone blueprints.
5. The old CDK is gone! Instead you can use any event within vRA that is pushed through the RabbitMQ message bus to trigger extensibility through workflow subscriptions.
6. vRealize Orchestrator has a new HTML5 Control Center which is your single admin point for plugin configuration as well as adding metrics and monitoring for all workflows being executed.
7. There’s no need for unique tenant URLs – the new vIDM platform allows a single logon interface for all tenants. (Though you can keep your URLs if you want!)
8. vIDM can also be used to control authentication from IP source, e.g. to restrict logon to a specific subnet regardless of whether the credentials are valid or not. This has some cool ramifications for having the web layer in a DMZ, for example.
9. Functionality is slowly being migrated from the old IaaS/DynamicOps layer to the appliance – this is fantastic news. The migrated portions (such as vSphere Endpoint configuration) are now accessible through the vRA API, as well as gaining the speed and stability that the appliances provide.
10. The new blueprint designer is awesome. Added to that what was AppD is now called App Services and allows you to take a base blueprint (e.g. a CentOS VM) and drag and drop software components that you’ve scripted on top (e.g. Apache, then PHP). You can also drag and drop XaaS (vRO workflows) onto the blueprint, as well as existing blueprints to create nested blueprints.
11. Much fuller integration between NSX and vRA. There’s a whole raft of improvements in the integration between vRA and NSX – e.g. you can drag a new routed network onto a blueprint and it will automatically create a new Logical Switch and Distributed Logical Router to attach the Logical Switch to. Similarly load balancing applications is a drag and drop operation, as is applying existing security groups.
12. All blueprints can be imported and exported in YAML, which opens up exciting possibilities for storing versioned blueprints and retrieving programmatically.
13. There are over 60 lifecycle events out of the box on which you can trigger Orchestrator workflows, but you can create custom filters based on properties and events to extend functionality – the only limitation is what you can imagine!

There are still several months of development to go between now and the GA of vRA 7 and the development seems to be moving at a great pace. Between beta 1 and beta 2 there was a huge amount of change, and even the version demoed today had new features and UI.

For the last few years at VMworld I’ve taken advantage of the discounted exam price and booked a “have-a-go” exam – typically an exam I’ve been wanting to do but not necessarily had the time I wanted to study for it. Since I have been fairly immersed in the NSX world for the last week, sitting in an NSX design and deploy class and surrounded by some very smart networking guys, I changed my “have-a-go” exam from the VCP6-CMA to the VCIX-NV.

As a vExpert, I am blessed to get 1000 CPU hours access to Ravello’s awesome platform and recently I’ve been playing with the AutoLab deployments tailored for Ravello.

If you’re unfamiliar with Ravello’s offering (where have you been?!) then it’s basically a custom hypervisor (HVX) running on either AWS or Google Cloud that allows you to run nested environments on those platforms. I did say it’s awesome.

After deploying a new vSphere 6 vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and configuring the Platform Services Controller (PSC) to act as a subordinate Certificate Authority (CS), I was unable to register the NSX Manager to the Lookup Service. Try saying that fast after a pint or two!?

Attempting to register NSX to the Lookup Service would result in the following error:

NSX Management Service operation failed.( Initialization of Admin Registration Service Provider failed. Root Cause: Error occurred while registration of lookup service, com.vmware.vim.vmomi.core.exception.CertificateValidationException: Server certificate chain not verified )

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.

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.

This is the second part of the 3rd article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model.

By the end of this part, we will not have modified the vCAC deployment in any way, we’ll just have 3 configured load balanced URLs

An overview of the steps required are below:

This is the first part of the 3rd article in a series about how to build-out a simple vCAC 6 installation to a distributed model.

By the end of this part, we will not have modified the vCAC deployment in any way, we’ll just have 3 configured load balanced URLs

An overview of the steps required are below:

I flew from Gatwick to Barcelona last night to my very first VMworld!

I’m staying in a hotel that is actually quite far from the conference, it’s a metro, train and bus journey away from the conference center and it takes about 40 minutes to get here. On the plus side I was only 5 minutes away from the VMUG party last night so I went over there for an hour or so. Note for future years - stay a little closer to the conference!