Prism Central Deployent on AHV

Posted on 29-12-2018 by Manish Jha

What is Prism Central?

Software to provide centralized infrastructure management, one-click simplicity and intelligent operations. Prism Central runs as a separate instance composed of either a single VM or a set of (3) VMs.

What does Prism Central provides?

Manage multi-cluster from single pane of glass.
Single sign-On for all registered clusters.
Entity Explorer to search various items.
Global alert and notifications.
Multi cluster analytics dashboard.
Dashboard Customization.
Capacity Forecast and Planning

Prism Central is a must have tool for every Nutanix administrator if they have a multi cluster Nutanix environment. In this post I am not stressing on explaining each features of Prism Central. I will write a separate blog post on that. In this post I will walk through the installation procedure for prism central.

Prism Central can be deployed directly from Prism Element. You can use one-click deploy method or the manual (imaging service) method. In this post I will demonstrate the one click method.… Read More

Learning NSX-T-Part 4: NSX Controllers Automated Deployment & Clustering

Posted on 29-07-2018 by Manish Jha

In last post of this series we deployed the NSX manager appliance. In this post we will learn how to deploy the NSX-T controller nodes.

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

1: Introduction to NSX-T

2: NSX-T Architecture

3: NSX Manager Deployment

There are 2 methods of deploying NSX controllers for vSphere integration with NSX-T:

Automated Installation of Controller from NSX Manager
Manual Installation of NSX Controller on ESXi via GUI or OVF tool

In this post we will not talk about controller deployment for non-vSphere infrastructure.

Also in this post we will be discussing only about Automated method for controllers. Manual installation will be covered in Next post of this series.

In order to deploy NSX controllers to consume NSX-T for your vSphere infrastructure, make sure following prerequisites are met:

vCenter Server and ESXi hosts are deployed.

Learning NSX-T-Part 2: NSX-T Architecture

Posted on 27-07-2018 by Manish Jha

As we discussed in first post of this series that NSX-T was born to meet the demands of the containerized workload, multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud.

The best use case that you can think of NSX-T is that it provides seamless connectivity and security services for all types of endpoints including virtual machines, containers and bare metal. It doesn’t really matter where these endpoints are. It could be in your on-prem datacenter, a remote office or in the cloud.

In this post we will look how NSX-T architecture looks like.

Like NSX-V, NSX-T too contains a management plane, data plane and a control plane. Lets discuss about each plane individually here.

Data Plane

NSX-T uses in-kernel modules for ESXi and KVM hypervisors for constructing data plane.
Since NSX-T is decoupled from vSphere, it don’t rely on vSphere vSwitch for network connectivity. NSX-T data plane introduces a host switch called N-VDS (NSX Managed Virtual Distributed Switch).

Learning HCX-Part 6: Deploying Fleet Appliances

Posted on 04-07-2018 by Manish Jha

In last post of this series we did the fleet configuration so that we can deploy the fleet appliances. In this post we will discuss about the fleet appliances and will deploy them.

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

4: HCX Site Pairing

5: Configuring Interconnect Networks

There are 3 appliances that you can deploy in your HCX environment:

Cloud Gateway (CGW): The CGW appliance is responsible for creating encrypted tunnel between on-premise and HCX-Cloud for vMotion and Replication traffic. CGW deployment is kicked from on-prem and its deployed as virtual machine in both on-prem and cloud side.

CGW constitutes the migration path for vMotion and replication traffic and it is done via establishing a secure connection between the 2 CGW vm’s deployed in on-prem and cloud side respectively.… Read More

Troubleshoot VMware NSX Connectivity Issues

Posted on 18-06-2018 by Manish Jha

Monitor and analyze virtual machine traffic with Flow Monitoring

Flow monitoring is used to capture ingress/egress traffic of VM’s in a NSX environment. Flow monitoring is disabled by default and you need to enable it before you can use this tool. Once Flow monitoring is enabled, you need to wait for some time to let this tool gather data about your vSphere environment (much like how vROPS gather data before generating reports/recommendations etc)

Flow monitoring can be enabled by navigating to Networking & Security > Flow Monitoring > Configuration and clicking on Enable.

Under Flow Exclusion, you can exclude any object which you don’t want to monitor. For example, you can select option “destination” under Exclusion Settings and click on + button to specify a destination container for which flow monitoring data won’t be gathered.

Flow Monitoring Dashboard

Here you can see Top Flows, Top Destinations and Top Sources of your environment. … Read More

vRealize Automation 7.3-Simple Installation: Part 10: Catalog Management

Posted on 15-01-2018 by Manish Jha

In last post of this series we learnt how to create and design blueprints. This post will be focussed on catalog management. Once you have created blueprint items, next thing is to associate them with a service and defining the entitlements so that end-user can start requesting items from catalog to which they are entitled for.

If you have landed directly on this page by mistake, then I encourage you to read earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: vRA Lab Setup

2: Installing and Configuring NSX

3: Installing SQL Server for IaaS DB

4: Installing and Configuring vRealize Automation Appliance

5: Tenant and Users Initial Configuration

6: Configuring Endpoints

7: Creating Fabric and Business Groups

8: Creating Network Profiles & Reservations

9: Configuring Blueprints

We will start the discussion with service and then proceed to entitlements.

What is service?

Services are used to organize catalog items into related offerings to make it easier for end users to browse catalog items they needed in an easier and convenient way.… Read More

vRealize Automation 7.3-Simple Installation: Part 7: Creating Fabric and Business Groups

Posted on 08-01-2018 by Manish Jha

In last post of this series we learn how to add various endpoints to vRA so that the endpoints can be consumed by the users. The resources presented by endpoints first needs to be aggregated in fabric groups so that they can be assigned to users. In this post we will learn about fabric groups and business groups and will walk-through how to create them

If you have landed directly on this page by mistake, then I urge you to read earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: vRA Lab Setup

2: Installing and Configuring NSX

3: Installing SQL Server for IaaS DB

4: Installing and Configuring vRealize Automation Appliance

5: Tenant and Users Initial Configuration

6: Configuring Endpoints

So what is a Fabric Group?

The Fabric groups are what enable you to provide access to resources from your physical infrastructure. Fabric includes all the computing resources that are discovered from the added endpoint data collection.… Read More

Deploy Virtual Volumes

Posted on 02-09-2017 by Manish Jha

What is Virtual Volumes?

From VMware KB-2113013

Virtual Volumes (VVols) is a new integration and management framework that virtualizes SAN/NAS arrays, enabling a more efficient operational model that is optimized for virtualized environments and centered on the application instead of the infrastructure. Virtual Volumes simplifies operations through policy-driven automation that enables more agile storage consumption for virtual machines and dynamic adjustments in real time, when they are needed.

VVOL was first introduced in vSphere 6.0 and it changed the way how virtual machines are stored on storage. Before VVOL’s, the underlying datastores/LUN’s were provisioned and tagged as gold, silver and bronze type of model that forces a virtualization administrator to pick the storage tier that most closely matches their needs.

VVOL’s enables an administrator to apply a policy to a VM which defines the various performance and service-level agreement requirements, such as RAID level, replication or deduplication. The VM is then automatically placed on the storage array that fits those requirements.… Read More

Repointing vCenter Server 6.0 to External PSC’s across sites

Posted on 11-08-2017 by Manish Jha

In my last post I have demonstrated how to move a vCenter server from one PSC to another. In this article we will learn to repoint vCenter Server 6.0 between Platform Service Controllers (PSC) which are in same domain but different sites.

Before vSphere 6.0 U1, it was not possible to repoint vCenter server amongst PSC’s which were not in same site (but being in same domain). With vSphere 6.0 U1, VMware made this possible by introducing a new utility called cmsso-util.

VMware KB-2131191 article outline the steps for achieving this goal.The steps outlined in the KB are for vCenter server with external PSC deployment architecture.

Note: If you have an embedded vCenter 6.0, then you can use cmsso-util to change embedded deployment model to an external PSC model. The old PSC will be decommissioned during this process. Go ahead with this configuration only if you have no plans for using your old PSC again.… Read More

vRealize Automation-Create Business Group and Reservation

Posted on 18-09-2015 by Manish Jha

What is a Business Group?

A Business group associates a set of services and resources to a set of users, such as a line of business, department, or other organizational unit. A business group is created within a tenant by the tenant administrator.

A business group can have access to catalog items specific to that group and to catalog items that are shared between business groups in the same tenant. Each business group has one or more reservations that determine on which compute resources, virtual machines that this group has requested can be provisioned. To request catalog items, a user must belong to at least one business group. A user can be a member of more than one business group, and can have different roles in different groups.

A business group must have at least one business group manager, who monitors the resource use for the group and often is an approver for catalog requests.… Read More