The SSD tier in my lab became quite full in the beginning of this year, so the search began for some expansion. All 8 hot-swap slots in my single node lab server are occupied so, it needed to be an NVMe drive due to slot availability but mainly because of lower latency, more queues, lower host utilization and higher bandwidth compared to SATA and SAS drives. Current situation The storage in my homelab consists of Read more…
The second part of this topic in the “vCloud Director Identity and Access Management” series touches the “per Org VDC” permission feature. I decided to split the topic into a multi-part series due to the length of the original one. The first part can be found using the link below: vCloud Director Identity and Access Management – Part 1 Org VDC permissions The “per Org VDC ” permission feature was recently brought up by my Read more…
Since a while now, customers show an increasingly interest in data-at-rest encryption. vSphere has build-in encryption features since the 6.5 version. I wrote this post to show how Equinix SmartKey can help implementing these encryption features without buying HSM appliances yourself. Since I started working with the SmartKey product, I was surprised how easy and intuitive it was to implement vSphere VM and vSAN encryption. So, what is an HSM? The acronym stands for ‘Hardware Read more…
After a recent Windows related update, I noticed that files were not synchronizing anymore on my desktop. After a quick look into the recent changes, I discovered that on the 17th of February the latest Windows cumulative update was installed. Which was around the time the sync was broken. To be more specific, the version installed was: Windows “2020-2 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1909 for x64-based Systems (KB4532693) for OS Builds 18362.657 and Read more…
Background In this post I want to share with you the possibilities to remove problematic ESXi based Transport Nodes running NSX-T 2.4+, 3.x and 4.x manually from NSX Manager. Especially including the nodes NSX configuration and accompanying VIBs. To be clear, this should be your last resort option if the regular procedures to remove ESXi based Transport Nodes from the NSX Manager do not work anymore. In production environments I would even suggest to perform Read more…
(Update 4-2-2020: Rights Bundles section added) (Update 29-3-2020: Org VDC section added) Recently I had a meeting with a customer to discuss the possibilities within vCloud Director (vCD) to implement a suitable Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution. IAM Solutions are imported to many customers that have teams with multiple roles that manage the service. Other reasons businesses need it could be for compliance or legislation requirements. Wikipedia summarizes it quite good: Identity and Access Read more…
Last week I was deploying a Debian 9 (Stretch) based Linux OVA from the Bitnami catalog. One of the first things to do after a deployment is to replace the DHCP assigned IP address with a static one. Deploying the VM itself is not really blog worthy. What did bother me, is that my VM ended up with 2 IP addresses on 1 ethernet interface after configuring a static IP. The interface had a DHCP Read more…
This VMworld (2019 EU), I went for the vSAN Specialist 2019 exam (5V0-21.19) and associated badge. My current (2017 version) badge recently got retired so it was time for an update. The badge itself is only issued if you are VCP6-DCV, VCP6.5-DCV or VCP-DCV 2019 certified. It’s a nice bonus that exams at VMworld are at a 50% discount. Hopefully this blog post will give you some guidelines how to approach the exam. The study Read more…