Author: lifeofbrianoc

My name is Brian O’Connell. I work for VMware as part of the Integrated Systems Business Unit (ISBU) working on VMware Validate Designs (VVD) & VMware Cloud Foundation (vCF). I am an IT geek at heart and love playing with new technologies. I started my career in an IT services role as a Systems administrator for SMB’s and moved to EMC in 2010 where I worked for the EMC vLab team developing content for the ever expanding vLab cloud platform. I moved into working with the EMC Cloud Engineering Team primarily focused on the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution (EHC). I am also a husband to a beautiful wife, father to 2 beautiful daughters and a musician (or failed rock star depending on how you look at it!)

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager Logs: The Easy Way

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vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) is a one stop shop for lifecycle management  (LCM) of your VMware vRealize Suite (vRA, vRB, vROPs, vRLI) . VMware Validate Designs leverages this via Cloud Builder for initial SDDC deployment but it also covers upgrade from a single interface, reducing the need to jump between interfaces by bringing all LCM tasks into a single UI. This doesn’t come without its challenges however, as vRSLCM is now responsible for aggregating all the install/upgrade logs and presenting them in a coherent manner to the user…which isn’t always the case. vRSLCM logs activity in /var/log/vlcm/vrlcm-server.log but at best you get something like this

GET http://localhost:8080/suite/status/1c4a2929-e09c-4a22-b9f1-2834ec1bd65c: 200 null

Which let’s face it isnt very helpful…or is it? At first glance its just a job ID but thanks to @leahy_s in VMware CMBU I can now make this job ID give me more information in a much more structured way, similar to tail -f. Here’s how

And now you should have some readable JSON, hopefully with some more info on the error you are hitting

 

VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 6: Deploy The SDDC

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This is part 6 of a series of posts on VMware Cloud Builder. 

In this final post, now that we have passed all validation, we will run the SDDC deployment using VMware Cloud Builder.

Continue reading “VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 6: Deploy The SDDC” →

VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 5: Cloud Builder Deployment & Environment Validation

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This is part 5 of a series of posts on VMware Cloud Builder.

Hopefully you’re still with me!

In this post I will cover the deployment and initial configuration of the VMware Cloud Builder appliance, ingestion of the deployment parameters file, and environment validation.

Continue reading “VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 5: Cloud Builder Deployment & Environment Validation” →

VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 4: Generating SSL Certificates

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This is part 4 of a series of posts on VMware Cloud Builder.

In this post I will cover generating the required SSL certificates for deploying this VMware Validated Design with VMware Cloud Builder.

Friendly warning: This is a long post so maybe get a coffee before reading!

Continue reading “VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 4: Generating SSL Certificates” →

VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 3: Deployment Parameters File

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This is part 3 of a series of posts on VMware Cloud Builder.

In this post I will cover the deployment parameters file.

Continue reading “VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 3: Deployment Parameters File” →

VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 2: Environment Prerequisites

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This is part 2 of a series of posts on VMware Cloud Builder.

In this post I will cover the initial environment prerequisites required before you can deploy your VMware Validated Design SDDC with Cloud Builder. These fall into 5 key areas:

  1. Prerequisites for Virtual Infrastructure Layer Implementation in Region A
  2. Prerequisites for Operations Management Layer Implementation in Region A
  3. Prerequisites for Cloud Management Layer Implementation in Region A
  4. Prerequisites for Business Continuity Layer Implementation in Region A
  5. Generate Certificates for the SDDC Components in Region A

Continue reading “VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 2: Environment Prerequisites” →

VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 1: Overview

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This is the first in a series of posts on VMware Cloud Builder – The automated deployment engine for VMware Validated Design – which delivers consistent and repeatable Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) deployments across your regions. Hopefully you will find it useful!

Continue reading “VMware Validated Design – Automated Deployment with Cloud Builder – Part 1: Overview” →

VMware Validated Designs 5.0 – What’s New?

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VMware Validated Designs is a complete set of prescriptive blueprints on how to deploy a VMware based Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC). It includes Planning & Preparation guidance, detailed Architecture & Design documentation, design decisions – including justifications & implications for each decision – deployment guidance, upgrade guidance and now automated deployment. All of which is created by a team of VMware architects working behind the scenes with every VMware business unit…all with a view to ensuring that deploying the VMware SDDC is consistent & effortless for customers and partners.

Today saw the release of VMware Validated Designs 5.0. The documentation can be found here. I will delve into some of this in more depth in future posts but here are the highlights of today’s release

EDIT: I missed a major addition in the VMware Validated Designs 5.0 release – The new Document Map. This map provides guidance on how and when to navigate each document to make the documentation flow easier to consume

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Beware VLAN double tagging!

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In setting up some additional ESXi hosts in an aforementioned lab we ran into an issue where we could not communicate with the new hosts after setting static IPs and relevant management VLANs on them. The hosts are connected to 2 TOR switches (Cisco 9K Top Of Rack). Investigating on the switch you could see the hosts connected on the expected port on each switch (Ethernet 1/14 on each) by searching the mac address table for the relevant mac

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NSX IPSec VPN between datacenters (multi site/region)

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I’m doing some lab work with my team at the moment and we were gifted some hardware to do some multi region validation. Both systems (a VxRack SDDC & a VxRail) are in 2 separate datacenters, and both are using private IP addressing that is not routable between datacenters. As part of the validation we need both systems to be able to communicate with each other, however we dont control the inter lab switching to put in place the necessary routes to enable this. Rather than go through a change control process with the keepers of that gate we decided to get creative and have some fun (and hopefully learn something!) by setting up an NSX IPSec VPN between the labs.

Disclaimer: There are many better ways to do this for a permanent lab setup (i.e. BGP to the core with routes) but this was done on borrowed kit that was never initially designed with inter lab routing as a requirement, with no direct control on the inter lab switches, and we would also like to put it back the way we found it so dont want to make sweeping architectural changes!

Continue reading “NSX IPSec VPN between datacenters (multi site/region)” →