Author

Tommy Grot

Education

I passed my VCAP-DCV Deploy 2023!

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 1 minutes read

On Wednesday 11th, 2023, I took the VCAP-DCV Deploy 2023 and passed it! It was my first lab/exam of 2023. After completing this exam, I earned the VCIX – VMware Certified Implementation Expert milestone, this unlocks the next level for me to pursue my VMware Certified Data Center Expert (VCDX).

Information on Data Center Virtualization track from VMware

Information About the Exam –

After getting logged in the first thing I did was fire up Notepad++ I created a task list of all 17 questions, this way any step I did during the exam I would document what I did and what I configured so I can trace back what I did. Overall, I enjoyed the exam/lab. It was fun to do the tasks, I recommend getting all the easy ones first that way you can concentrate on the longer duration tasks that.

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CloudNetworking

Reverse Proxy & Load Balancing a Web Server with VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 3 minutes read

Want to setup a load balancer and reverse proxy with VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer, and you want to replace your Nginx Reverse Proxy, well let’s get started!

First, we will make sure that you already have NSX ALB setup and configured within your environment, this walkthrough will only step you through on building a Virtual Service and Pools and VIPs for your multiple web servers. During this deployment you can set up many different FQDNs.

Requirements

  • Public FQDN
  • Lets Encrypt SSL Certificate (Wild Card or SAN or Single Cert)
  • NAT – Service Engine
  • Virtual IP
  • Service Pool
  • Web Server(s)

Product Versions:

  • VMware NSX ALB: 22.1.2
  • VMware NSX: 4.0.1.1.0.20598726

Steps

Login as an administrator account to NSX ALB ->

Go to Virtual Services -> Create Virtual Service

Select -> Advanced Setup

Next prompt -> Select your Cloud (For my setup I am doing everything NSX Overlay Backed)

Click Next -> Select your VRF Context (I am using a Tier 1 Gateway)

So now at this point – you should see this screen below, we will create a New Virtual Service, this will be the main ingress and egress point of your network and the external world. I have a NAT from my firewall going to this Virtual Service (VIP) Virtual IP.

  • Name: External-ParentSNI-VS (This is my naming convention, but you can choose your own)
  • Select: Enable Virtual Hosting VS
  • Virtual Hosting Type: SNI
  • VS VIP – (Create the main VIP for Ingress/Egress NAT, that is routable)
  • Application Profile: System-Secure-HTTP
  • WAF ( You can enable if you would like too, this is optional)
  • Service Port ( 80,443 – For 443 you will want to select SSL)
  • Pool – (Create a Pool, I used one of my very first web servers to start the pool)
  • SSL Certificate – Select your Cert – by default ALB will put System-Default-Cert

Click Save / Next – For this portion of the Virtual Service with Parent SNI we are done, next we will deploy the Child SNI which will be a parent to the main Ingress/Egress SNI Virtual Service.

As an example – I will use my Virtual Bytes SNI Child Virtual hosting.

Click on drop down for Pool, if you have not created a pool we will do so now.

  • Name: External-Parent-SNI-VS-Pool
  • VRF Context – Your Tier 1 Gateway
  • Default Server Port: 443

Select your first webserver, this will let you start the Virtual Service. You can do it via a IP Group or IP Address or DNS Name as well as have the capability to use a security group from NSX.

After you have created all the required services you should be able to access your web server from an internal or external (Internet) if you have NAT’d. But for the next steps we will repeat the steps for a Child SNI.

Child SNI Setup

  • Go to Virtual Services – > Click on Create Virtual Service (Advanced)
  • Name: You Web Server
  • Check – Virtual Hosting VS
  • Virtual Hosting Type: SNI
  • Virtual Hosting Parent: External-ParentSNI-VS (or your own naming)
  • Domain Name: www.yourdomain.com
  • Application Mode: System Secure-HTTP
  • Pool: Create a pool for the Virtual Machine or service you want to load balance
  • SSL Certificate: Select your Certificate

Click Next all the way till the end, and now you have successfully setup a Child SNI which now you can replicate the same steps for multiple web servers, and you no longer need to NAT anymore IPs, since your main ingress/egress is already NAT’d and everything will flow through the main Parent service.

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Cloud

“The Next Chapter of Cloud Management” VMware’s LAST multi-cloud briefing of 2022

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 2 minutes read

With all these organizations trying to be multi-cloud centric it is hard to set up and control all those environments. Organizations that have Amazon Web Services or Azure and they run VMware Clouds on top of those environments, well that’s a tedious job to keep control and tabs on everything. Creating dashboards and information from a high level for leadership will let them know what kind of costs and consumption they are utilizing for their workloads. Well, with VMware Aria Hub – it is now possible to keep track of everything, from cost to capacity and consumption and how they can scale back workloads without compromising the business aspect and goals!

*** Disclaimer *** – Preview information and functionality will not be available till early 2023!

Links:

Check out the Video below for more details –

VMware Aria Graph is a highly scalable system but also federated which you can federate from any other third party with their solutions. You can gather data from many third-party sources and create rich data and analytics to help your business needs. With VMware Aria Graph if you already own VMware vRealize Suite then this will be even better for your organization this will allow you to gather data and create more richer business models and practices with the data you will gather about your environment.

Main Dashboard – Shows overall cost, infrastructure and security compliance, and many more features.

Application View – This lets you see the aggregate information of your application, along with resources, and cost and what relationships the application has for what kind of image was used to build this and what kind of security settings have been applied like firewall rules..

Aria Guard Rails – Policy as code, continuous police enforcement engine. This will let you know what kind of security violations that are not controlled and with guard rails there is a library with pre-built templates for bootstrapping environments, cost, security. This will let you ensure that you set the proper security policies.

Deployment Information – Resources this draws out in detail how your workloads a connected and consumed and you can click on each individual icon and get into the depth information of each workload or VM

Migrating Workloads to VMC – you can select what kind of workloads you want to move to AWS VMC; you can get very granular on what kind of VM you want to move, you can move based on VLANs or prevent moving some workloads to save cost or keep on premise.

Cost of Ownership, this allows you to preview what your workload would cost on VMC on AWS.

Migration Planning – Gives you an awesome road map to plan out your workloads and how they will migrate and what business practices you want to implement and execute before running the migration.

Step 2 of Migration

Step 4 – Scheduling your migration

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Cloud

VMware Aria – VMware Multi-Cloud Briefing December 5th, 2022

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 1 minutes read

The new and exciting annoucment that occured at VMware Explore 2022 about VMware Aria! I personally got to meet the team behind the VMware Aria and vRealize Buisness Unit team thank to our awesome VMware Senior Techinical Account Manager!

My first day at VMware Explore 2022, I got to see all the new release and information before it hit emargo, with Purnima’s Session with the Multi Cloud Journy. Overall, it was a great time to see how the product would help organizations and developers and engineers with creating new solutiuons that are multi-cloud. Many oragnizations today, are going versatile with many different clouds where many of the organizations are in a cloud chaos point in their life of their organization and they do not know or how to take control over and get their cloud infrastructures and development in line.

With that said! I am linking here some news that will be released on December 5th, 2022. So stay tuned and check this page below!

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VMware ESXiVMware vCenter

vSphere 8 vMotion Unified Data Transport

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 2 minutes read

Tonight’s topic is about vMotion! But not just any kind of vMotion, we are going to enable blazing fast speeds to migrate your workloads. Before we get into the topic, I want to bring up information on VMware vSphere 8! I have been using the GA version of vSphere 8 on my new home lab (datacenter) and it’s been great so far!

vSphere vMotion migrates a(n) running state of a virtual machine from one ESXI host to another ESXI host in minutes or now even seconds! This allows you to vMotion workloads much faster now with vMotion protocol in vSphere 8 and all its huge performance improvements cause before standard vMotion utilized Network File Copy (NFC) which this was much slower and took longer but now with Unified Data Transport we will now enable Provisioning on the same vMotion VMkernel to speed up migration of workloads!

Here is more information from VMware:

To solve this problem, we introduce a new protocol called Unified Data Transport (UDT). In a nutshell, UDT combines the best of the NFC and vSphere vMotion protocols. Unified Data Transport (UDT) uses NFC as a control channel but offloads the data transfer to the vSphere vMotion protocol to benefit from the substantially greater performance and throughput.

How to Configure? Well Lets start!

Login into your vCSA

Go to your first ESXi hosts -> VMkernel Adapters

Click Edit on vMotion VMkernel, for mine it is vmk2

Select Provisioning along make sure your vMotion Enabled Service stays selected.

Click OK -> You will see a +1 Under Enabled Services and now I have vMotion and Provisioning Enabled on my single vmk2.

Repeat the steps on your next following ESXi Hosts.

That is it! Start enjoying the blazing speeds of migrating your workloads from ESXi host to another ESXi host!

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VMware vCenter

Upgrading vSphere 7.0.3 to vSphere 8.0

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 6 minutes read

vSphere 8 Update 1 – Released!! If you want to see how to upgrade go here to new blog post!

I will be going over on how to upgrade your vSphere 7 to vSphere 8! I will be doing step by step screenshots to walk anyone through, keep in mind that this is upgrading from vSphere 7.0.3 going to vSphere 8.0.

Exciting news! vSphere 8 is (IA) Yes, there is a new release model. Below I have some information below from VMware’s website but if you want to get more in-depth information go to the link below!

New IA/GA model (Information from VMware)

Our intent going forward is that all major and update vSphere releases will be delivered first with an IA designation. An IA release is a production-quality release that meets all GA quality gates and is fully partner certified. IA releases will be available during the IA phase to all customers for production deployments.

Changing to this IA/GA model is motivated by several factors. Most importantly, feedback from customers who want us to be more explicit when a release has achieved strong traction and usage without having to wait for the next update release, which they sometimes use as a proxy. By switching the designation from IA to GA, we’ll be making it clear when the release has gained wide adoption. We think this is a better model than waiting for a 6-month update, particularly as these updates now include feature enhancements as well as net new features.

DISCLAIMER:

– Everything I document here is on my lab, do not try this on a production system if you do not have backups or a way to restore if something goes wrong.

– This Walkthrough is only for a vSphere Cluster upgrade

Before you start the upgrde ensure you have a backup of your vCenter Server Appliance.

We will be upgrading a vSphere 7.0.3 Cluster to vSphere 8.0! Below is the vSphere 7 snippet

Download you ISO from VMware’s website and copy the iso to your local workstation

Once you get your ISO ready mount it to your local computer and drill down into the

vcsa-ui-installer -> win32 -> then execute installer.exe

Go to Upgrade ->

Once you are ready to upgrade your environment you will go Next

Once you get to this window, you will want to fill in your Source Appliance which is the vSphere 7 Cluster you want to upgrade. For Example: lab-vcsa-m01.virtualbytes.io

Then -> Click Connect to Source

Once it connects to the source server, you will get this detail specific page during the deployment asking to fill in the vCenter Server Appliance SSO Username and Password along with the Appliance (OS) root password along with the ESXi Host or vCenter Server that manages the source appliance

Accept the Certificate Warning which you will have your Source and Destination servers where the appliance will get deployed

Input your vCenter Server deployment target, where the new vCenter Server Appliance will get deployed

If you are installing this select your current datacenter object where the vCSA appliance will be stored in

This is creating the new vCSA on the target server, you will want to make sure that the two vCenter Server Appliances do not collide with the same naming convention or you will get any error saying this name for the VM exists.

Fill in your network information for the upgraded preparation

After ~15 minutes, you will get to the Phase 2 of the Upgrade Process, Click -> Next

I purposly did not enable SSH on my source vCenter Server, this way if anyone encounters the same issue, this will guide you to make sure you have SSH enabled on the Source vCenter Server Applaince or you will get this error below 🙂

After you enabled SSH and re-try the task you will go into the Pre-Upgrade Checks state

Below is a Pre-Upgrade check result which has some Warnings to let you know

Here at this step we are about to upgrade the data for our vCSA! Select your requirment, i only did the Configuration and Inventory.

Select – > I have backed up the source vCenter Server and all the required data from the database.

WARNING!! – Make sure you have your source vCenter backed up and/or snapshot to revert too if something does not upgrade properly.

This process will take ~ 15 – 20 minutes max, but this also depends on how large your environment is, the more objects in the data base the longer it will take.

Next snippet, will show you that we have copied the data from the source vCenter Server to the Targer vCenter Server

Now, that we have finalized the migration and the import to the target vCenter Server is done, we will log into the new vCSA appliance.

Login with your ” [email protected]”

Now, you shall see that our vCenter Server is at vSphere 8. Next we will be creating a Baseline within vSphere Life Cycle Manager to upgrade our Hosts.

Click on the top right hamburger menu -> Life Cycle Manager

Go to Imported ISOs ->

Now we will upload our vSphere 8 ISO – > VMware-VMvisor-Installer-8.0-20513097.x86_64.iso

Once it is uploaded, we will go and create a Baseline for our new Image to upgrade the ESXi hosts from ESXi 7 to 8

Then go “Baselines” -> New -> Baseline

Now we will create a name for our baseline -> vSphere 8 Upgrade

Attach the vSphere 8.0 iso we just uploaded earlier to this baseline.

Finalize the Creation of the vSphere 8 Upgrade baseline

Then go back to the ESXi host object, and go to Updates tab

Here we will attach the vSphere 8 Upgrade Baseline we created

Once the ESXi host has the new vSphere 8 baseline attached, you can now Remediate the host, and then repeat the vLCM (vSphere Life Cycle Manager) Baseline attach to the rest of your hosts and then follow the traditional Remediation process that way your ESXi hosts properly migrate workloads off to other ESXi hosts during this process to ensure that you won’t have any downtime.

Web console view of our ESXi host that just got upgraded!!

Our first ESXi host has been upgraded to vSphere 8!

Next, after all our ESXi hosts are on vSphere 8, we will want to make sure that our vSAN version is upgraded so you will want to upgrade it.

Go to your vSAN Cluster -> Configure -> Services

Once you get to vSAN Services, you will see Pre-Check vSAN upgrade and Upgrade vSAN. A proper best practice is to do a pre-check of your vSAN cluster to ensure that all the objects are healthy and synchronized and there are not disk issues before doing a vSAN upgrade.

After vSAN upgrade – Your vSphere Cluster is now officially upgraded to vSphere 8! with vSAN 8! This walkthrough was able to walk you through any issues that you may encounter. Next blog post will be on how to convert a vSAN (OSA) Datastore to vSAN (ESA) – Express Storage Architecture

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VMware Troubleshooting

Unregister vCSA Plugin or Extension via vCenter MOB

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 1 minutes read

Have you had an issue with vCenter Server Appliance? Well there is a way to fix and remove a plugin or extension. Open up your browser to https://<your-vcenter-ip>/mob and login with your credentials, if you do not have any other identity source you will need to login with your [email protected] SSO account.

Go to Content ->

Go to Exetension Manager ->

Go to More -> look for your extension that has been registered.

Copy the file name from “com.xxx.xxxx.xxxxxx.xxxx”

Go to Unregister -> and paste in the value and execute Invoke Method

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VMware ESXi

TrueNAS Scale – iSCSI & VMware vSphere 7.x

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 3 minutes read

Tonight’s topic is about TrueNAS Scale and VMware vSphere 7.x integration and setup for iSCSI. I have been reading lots of topics and support forums where not many posts have the correct tuning / settings.

The issue: When you try to mount a iSCSI LUN to vSphere 7, it will try to format that new iSCSI LUN and it will error out – ATP, error – check VMkernel logs, the interesting thing is that VMFS 5 was able to format the new LUN i created, so i did that as a test to know that I have network connectivtity along with being able to ping the iSCSI Server on the dedicated network. After that I started doing troubleshooting to pin point the issue, after some trial and error I found the issue! Below I will walk you through configuration from TrueNAS Scale side.

Disclaimer! – All tweaks and steps here I have done on a fresh TrueNAS Unit, do not try if you don’t have anything backed up. This is solely under your own risk!

So, first things first! Let’s create our zVol and create an allocated space for your iSCSI LUN.

Versions

  • TrueNAS-SCALE-22.02.3
  • VMware ESXi, 7.0.3, 20036589

Then change the Record Size to 16K, under the whole pool. This is required for VMFS 6!

Then we will go to Sharing page – Click Add for Block (iSCSI) Shares Target

Setup the settings for Base Name (usually this come by default, buti if you need to change you can)

I have dedicated 2 x 40Gb Bonded (LACP) Mellanox Connect X3 and my backbone is a Arista DCS-7050QX-32S-F, so for the iSCSI Portal I have a dedicated isolated subnet that is Layer 2 only no routing and Jumbo Frames (9214)

Add your multiple hosts and their IQNs from your software iSCSI adapter or hardware iSCSI adapter if you have one.

Since I have an isolated subnet I skipped Authorized Access.

Now, we will setup the iSCSI Target, you will need to add name and the iSCSI group make sure you have your Portal setup and all the IQNs populated in a group

Next we will add an extent and map the device after you have created the previous pre-reqs

Name: (your Extent Name)

Extent Type: Device

Device: (zvol/yournasname)

Logical Block Size 512 – this is important your VMFS 6 wont like it along with the other sector and record sizes

Check Disable Physical Block Size Reporting

Then associate your target to your LUN ID, by default it will use the next available one. Then map that to your extent name

After you finshed, your creation of the iSCSI portion on TrueNAS, then go back to you vCenter Server or ESXi and re-scan HBA and Storage and you should see TrueNAS iSCSI pop up!

Then right click on the Data Center object- Storage – New Datastore

VMFS

Select the Storage Pool that is presented in the window, once you do, click next and select all storage capacity for the next window and then hit finish! Below you should see your new iSCSI LUN! 🙂

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Events

VMware Explore 2022 – My Journey!

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 2 minutes read

An early morning on August 28th, 2022, I got ready and drove toward Denver International Airport. Got there at 3AM. Then went on my way to the gate and was ready and excited to be at VMware Explore! When I was on my flight, I met two guys on my flight that were as well attending VMware Explore as they were local to Denver.

When we arrived at San Francisco it was a busy day with lots of exploration and adventures, the two guys I met on the plane we all got to explore San Francisco, Golden Gate Bridge and check out the Pier! We were all patiently waiting to get to our hotels and get our VMware Explore badges that Sunday we arrived! Monday came around the corner, I was so excited to go to the Moscone Convention Center and start exploring! I met even more people and even tagged along with many VMware employees! I have attended so many breakout sessions, and HOL events. It was hard to keep track of time. The General Session at Explore was amazing with the creativity and intros and how everything was laid out and well-presented it was amazing to experience it in person!
Picture of General Session – thousands of people were coming in!
The first day The Expo opened up!
I had the pleasure of meeting lots of other people and being able to collab and exchange knowledge and experiences. During my week with all the busy events, breakout sessions, I had meetings setup with a lot of the Vice Presidents & Management members of many of the Business Units within VMware (VMware Cloud Foundation, R&D Engineering, NSX ALB Team, VP of Products, Engineers and even the creator of VMware Cloud Director himself! ) It was a blast! and being able to exchange information and show case what I have been architecting and engineering a solution for my work. As with all those meetings going on, my most favorite was meeting Mark Gabryjelski #23 VCDX! He is Polish! just as I am, he and I got to geek out and show him my home lab! I even started the thought and goal I want to achieve, of being a VMware Certified Design Expert myself! Here I come for the VCDX!
(Me on Left, Mark Gabryjelski, VCDX#23 on right Right)
Overall, my experience at VMware Explore was amazing with the 41 Miles of walking I did, I can go on with so much more detail and keep talking about it but it might become a book! The VMware Party at the Chase Center Arena was awesome, tons of yummy food and tons of people! Local bands and DJ were playing live music!
                                                             THE PARTY!

VMware Explore 2023 – Here I come!

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Cloud

VMware Cloud Director – Customization & Branding w/ API

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 3 minutes read

A in depth post on how to customize your VMware Cloud Director! If your organization has a specific theme and logo, well tonight’s post will guide you through the steps to get it all configured and looking all spiffy!

By default, installation Cloud Director offers two types of themes, the default white mode and dark mode. You can manage, create, and add your own themes to VCD. The steps we will be following through will be done system level so all Tenants and the Provider will see the updated VCD UI!

First connect to VCD Cell appliance via SSH –

Change Directory to

cd /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin

Run the Cell Management Tool

./cell-management-tool manage-config -n backend.branding.requireAuthForBranding -v false

Next we will utilize Postman to do the next few tasks

Access Token Authentications

You will want to get your Access Token and API Version, below I will explain on how to do that to get your API version

Get -> https://<Your-IP-Here>/api/versions

Authorization Tab

  • Basic Auth – Username: “administrator@system” & Password: <your password>

Headers Tab

  • Key: Accept Value: application/*;version=37.0

Below is the supported version I utilized, I did not used the beta version.

</VersionInfo>
<VersionInfo deprecated="false">
    <Version>37.0</Version>
    <LoginUrl>https://172.16.204.120/cloudapi/1.0.0/sessions</LoginUrl>
    <ProviderLoginUrl>https://172.16.204.120/cloudapi/1.0.0/sessions/provider</ProviderLoginUrl>
</VersionInfo>

POST API Sessions

Now we will create a POST within Postman.

POST https://172.16.204.120/api/sessions

Authorization Tab

  • Basic Auth – Username: “administrator@system” & Password: <your password>

NOTE -> Once you execute the POST, make sure you get a 200 OK status before proceeding futher.

Next you will want to save the token above as sampled in the image, you will need it for the Beare Token.

Headers

  • KEY: x-vcloud-authorization VALUE: e31a8bd0d1244282bed8b4b809ba9e1f
  • KEY: X-VMWARE-VCLOUD-ACCESS-TOKEN VALUE: <eyJ….>

Cloud Director Web Portal Customization

For this next section you will need to execute GET calls to get the current portal configuration with the above Bearer Token KEYS and VALUES

GET https://172.16.204.120/cloudapi/branding

Once you execute the call you will want to go to the Body section and you will see something like this, but a fresh installation of VCD – Portal Name will be ” VMware Cloud Director” and the theme name would be “Default” Which mine is set to Dark mode.

Sample Body Configuration

{
    "portalName": "Virtual Bytes Cloud",
    "portalColor": null,
    "selectedTheme": {
        "themeType": "BUILT_IN",
        "name": "Dark"
    },
    "customLinks": [
        {
            "name": "help",
            "menuItemType": "override",
            "url": null
        },
        {
            "name": "imprint",
            "menuItemType": "override",
            "url": null
        },
        {
            "name": "about",
            "menuItemType": "override",
            "url": null
        },
        {
            "name": "vmrc",
            "menuItemType": "override",
            "url": null
        }
    ]
}

    Then once you get your custom configuration ready you will want to do a PUT Call via Postman

Once you POST your Branding configuration, go back to Web UI of VCD and hit refresh! You should see something like below 🙂

Cloud Director Web Portal Logo Customization

Now. for our logo we will do another API call via Postman to PUT a png file for the system level logo.

Authorization Tab

  • Bearer Token from previous API call we did

Headers

  • KEY: Accept VALUE: application/*;version=37.0
  • KEY: x-vcloud-authorization VALUE: “e31a8bd0d1244282bed8b4b809ba9e1f” <- Put your value for the call not mine 🙂
  • KEY: X-VMWARE-VCLOUD-ACCESS-TOKEN VALUE: “eyJhbGciOiJSUzI…..” <- I shorted the Bearer Token

Go to Body – Change it to binary and find your logo.png file to upload and then hit Send.

Top right corner you will see the logo I uploaded to Cloud Director!

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