vSphere

Learning HCX-Part 4: HCX Site Pairing

Manish Jha

In this post we will be pairing the HCX-Enterprise appliance with the HCX-Cloud to start consuming HCX features.

If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Introduction to HCX

2: HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration

3: HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration

Site pairing task is straight forward and it should compelte without any issue if all your configuration is correct. However In my lab I was getting an error “untrusted ssl connection” when trying to do site pairing.

If you are testing HCX in your lab environment, then for fixing this issue please read this article

 To pair HCX-Enterprise with HCX-Cloud, login to your on-premise vCenter Web Client and click on HCX plugin and go to Site Pairings tab.

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Click on Register new connection.

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Specify the public url of your HCX cloud appliance (we configured this while deploying the hcx cloud)

Specify the vCenter administrator user name.… Read More

HCX Site Pairing failed with error “Untrusted SSL Connection”

Manish Jha

In last post of HCX series, we deployed HCX Cloud appliance and performed basic configuration. The next step was to pair the HCX Enterprise appliance to the HCX Cloud so that we can start consuming HCX features. 

When I tried pairing the on-prem HCX to HCX Cloud, I was getting ssl connection error and site pairing task was failing.

site-pairing-error.png

I was pretty sure that this is happening because of untrusted ssl certs in my lab and I was thinking that may be I need to replace the self-signed certs with the CA signed certs. 

I quickly checked on this error with one of our staff engineer from hybridity team and he helped me with actual steps for fixing this issue. These are the high level steps you need to perform when you face this issue.

1: Generate Private and Public cert file on HCX Cloud appliance.

… Read More

Learning HCX-Part 3-HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration

Manish Jha

In the last post of this series, we deployed the HCX Enterprise appliance on-premise and connected it to the vCenter server, NSX manager, and PSC. In this post, I will demonstrate the deployment of the HCX cloud appliance on the cloud side and walk through the basic configuration steps.

I don’t have a true cloud site, but I have 2 vCenter servers in 2 locations. Site A is where I deployed HCX Enterprise, and Site B is where I am deploying the HCX Cloud appliance. I am treating Site B as a cloud location for now.

HCX Cloud deployment is very similar to HCX Enterprise deployment and follows VMware’s standard OVF deployment procedure.

1: Once the appliance is deployed and powered on, login to the appliance by typing https://hcxcloud-fqdn:9443 and using admin as the username and password set during deployment.

2: If you have your license key handy, then activate the appliance, or you can do this later as well.… Read More

Learning HCX-Part 2-HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration

Manish Jha

In the first post of this series, we learned about the basics of HCX and discussed that HCX is available in 2 versions, i.e., HCX Enterprise (for On-Prem) and HCX Cloud (for cloud providers).

In this post, we will learn how to deploy the HCX Enterprise appliance on-premises and touch down on the basic configuration. 

The deployment of the HCX Enterprise appliance is very similar to the standard OVF deployment of any VMware product, and nothing fancy is there. The below slide shows the walk-through steps for deploying the appliance. 

Note: Make sure to deploy the appliance as “Thick provisioned, lazy zeroed.”

By default, the HCX ENT appliance is deployed with 12 GB of RAM, 4 vCPUs, and 60 GB of HDD.

Once the appliance boots up, login to the appliance by typing https://hcx-fqdn:9443 and using admin as the username and password set during deployment.

You need to have your HCX license key handy for activating the appliance.… Read More

Learning HCX-Part 1: Introduction to HCX

Manish Jha

VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (previously known as HCX technologies) was announced by VMware last year during VMworld 2017 Europe, and it aimed at the following use cases:

  • Simplified Data Center Migration: Seamless migration of applications from on-premise to cloud. 
  • Infrastructure Hybridity: Hybrid Cloud Extension enables seamless cloud onboarding.
  • Disaster Recovery: In the event of a disaster, Hybrid Cloud Extension recovers the networking layer. Traffic routes are maintained as before the disaster, resulting in high-speed disaster recovery with low downtime.
  • Multi-Cloud Application Support: Hybrid Cloud Extension enables application components to exist in the multi-cloud world. 

So what exactly is the VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension?

VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension is a SaaS offering that provides application mobility and infrastructure hybridity across different vSphere versions, both on-premises and in the cloud.

 

To learn more about HCX, please see the VMware HCX FAQ section.

VMware journey from HCM to HCX

Before the HCX solution, VMware offered a similar product named “Hybrid Cloud Manager (HCM)” to support their vCloud Air service.… Read More

Exploring vSphere 6.7-Part-3: VUM What’s New And Feature Walkthrough Using HTML5 Client

Manish Jha

With the release of vSphere 6.5, vSphere Update Manager (VUM) was inegrated with VCSA which made customers very happy as we no longer needed an additional windows server for installing VUM.  

With vSphere 6.7, VMware integraded few of the VUM funtionality in the new HTML5 client. Not all the features are available in HTML5 client and few features like VUM configuration changes, VMware tools upgrade etc can only be performed via vSphere Web Client (flash).

VMware is working hard on incorporating all the VUM features in the new HTML5 client as soon as possible and we might see them in upcoming updates of vSphere 6.7. Isn’t it exciting to get rid of flash based Web Client (yeah screw that VMware !!!)

I have written few posts on vSphere 6.7 earlier. You can read those posts from below links:

Installing and Configuring Esxi 6.7

Installing and Configuring VCSA 6.7

So whats enhancements vSphere 6.7 brought for VUM?… Read More

Exploring vSphere 6.7-Part-2-Installing and Configuring VCSA

Manish Jha

In last post of this series we installed Esxi host and navigated around the HTML client to explor various options. In this post we will deploy VCSA host and will explore the new vSphere Client (HTML based).

Like Esxi host, installation of VCSA 6.7 has not much changed from previous version. Only the UI has become a slight better. I have outlined the steps in below slideshow.

Deploying VCSA

Once the Stage 1 of VCSA deployment completes, hit Continue to trigger the second stage of deployment to configure NTP settings and SSO domain configuration.

vc67-14.PNG

 

Once second stage of deployment is finished,  launch the HTML5 client (https://VCSA-FQDN/ui/) and login with administrator@SSO-domain and the password set during deployment.

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Assign License

As soon as you login to VCSA UI, you will observe a warning about VCSA running in evaluation mode. Click on “Manage Your Licenses” to assign a new challange. 

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Click on + button to add vcenter license key.… Read More

Exploring vSphere 6.7-Part-1-Installing and Configuring Esxi

Manish Jha

vSphere 6.7 was announced by VMware just a day before their 20th foundaton day i.e yesterday. Although this release isn’t as feature-packed as the previous release, but still a lot of enhancements are introduced such as:

  • Instant clone API
  • Quick Boot of Esxi 
  • Per-VM EVC
  • VM Hardware version 14 introduced

I have not tested these features yet so I am not writing in detail about these. The best way to learn and test the new features introduced is to deploy stuffs in lab and start playing around and hence the first post of this series is dedicated to installing Esxi host.

This post will be covered in 2 parts where in first part I will demonstrate installation of Esxi host and in second part we will explore the vSphere Client (HTML based) to configure basic stuffs. 

All download links related to vSphere 6.7 can be found here

Although the installation has been pretty much straight forward over the years and nothing is changed as such, but if you are newbie to VMware it wouldn’t hurt to check out the installation steps from below slideshow.… Read More

Installing PowerShell/PowerCLI on RHEL 7

Manish Jha

Today I was reading about influxDB and Grafana as I am planning to deploy it in my lab to monitor my vSphere infrastructure and while going through the installation/configuration steps, I stumbled on one step where we needed to have powercli installed on the box where grafana is installed.

Since I am planning to deploy the influxdb/grafana on my centos 7 box, I started looking for how to configure PowerCLI on top of unix variants. Read few articles and finally deployed it my lab.

PowerShell Core v6.0 was released few days ago by Microsoft with support for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. Around same time, VMware released PowerCLI 10.0 which is VMware’s “PowerShell-like” utility. PowerShell version for linux can be downloaded from here

In this post I will be demonstrating installation of both PowerShell and PowerCli Core on RHEL 7 system. If you’re interested in installing this on other variants of linux then please consult this article. … Read More

DRS/SDRS Affinity & Anti-Affinity Rules

Manish Jha

Although there are 1000 of articles written on this topic, purpose of writing this article is to cover few objectives of VCAP6-Deploy exam. When I published my VCAP6 study guide, few topics I left purposefully as I had planned to write them later when I get some time.

So in this post we will be discussing about DRS & SDRS affinity/anti-affinity rules. 

Affinity Rules – VM to VM

Affinity rules are used by DRS to keep 2 virtual machines always running together. Affinity rules are generally used to keep virtual machines toether which have dependency on each other.

For e.g: You may want to keep an application and a database servers together on same host so that communication between the 2 servers don’t have to traverse a network link. If the VM’s of a multi-tiered application are running on different hosts, then they may generate a lot of network traffic between 2 hosts and can affect performance of VM’s/Hosts.… Read More