virtuallyGhetto

Automating HCX Add On for VMware Cloud on AWS

06/19/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

Enabling Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) for a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC is just a click of a button and is completely self-service which makes consuming the HCX Service extremely easy! All the hard work of deploying and configuring the required HCX infrastructure for your SDDC is completely automated for you by VMware when you click on "Deploy HCX" button.

Once the HCX infrastructure has been deployed in your SDDC, you can then deploy the respective HCX components for your on-premises vSphere environment which you can fully automate end-to-end which I have blogged about here.

Although the deployment of the HCX components for the SDDC is just click of a button, I recently had a need to automate this and I figure this would be a nice addition to my HCX PowerShell Community Module and complete the end-to-end story quite nicely from enabling the HCX Cloud Service to automating the deployment and configuration of the on-premises HCX components.

New hardware support & enhancements to USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

06/17/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Since releasing the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling back in February, the feedback and support for this Fling has simply been amazing. I especially enjoy hearing from customers, almost on a weekly basis, on how they are taking advantage of this solution in their vSphere/vSAN/NSX home lab and enabling for more complex networking topologies.

When we released the fling, we had focused on the most popular USB 3.0 network adaptors that we had accessed to which were based on AX8817a, AX88179 & RTL8153 chipsets. The initial list started out with just 5 devices, but we knew there were going to be others. In fact, Songtao and I have received plenty of feedback from our customers on what they would like to see supported, including USB 2.0 network adaptors. Another highly requested feature that customers have been asking for is support for Jumbo Frames and this is usually in the context of setting up either an NSX-V or NSX-T environment.

Forwarding VMC Events to AWS Lambda/CloudWatch using Log Intelligence Webhook

06/11/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

In my previous post, I provided an example on how customers can take advantage of Log Intelligence's Webhook capability to consume VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) based events and extend that to other Public Cloud Services like Slack as an example to build new and interesting integrations. We took advantage of the fact that some of these Public Cloud Services either have native webhook support or have a built-in Webhook listener like IFTTT which in turn can support other services which may not have native Webhook support.

However, customers can also build their own Webhook listener, which is nothing more than being able to POST to an API endpoint with a pre-defined JSON payload. In fact, this would be needed for any on-premises integration if the solution does not support webhooks.

For VMC customers who currently consume AWS Services such as Lambda and CloudWatch, it is actually very easy to integrate these and other AWS Services directly using LINT's Webhook feature. In fact, I chose Lambda and CloudWatch as these are two of the mostly frequently asked integration points. At our recent VMC Customer Summit, which took place last month, I had built a demo based on an actual customer use case for sending specific VMC Events from LINT to Cloud Watch as that was their tool of choice for auditing purpose.

I decided to make use of Lambda as it allowed me to quickly integrate with CloudWatch and I could also show how lambda integration would work given the number of customers asking. Ultimately, Lambda also enabled me to easily build a Webhook listener to process the LINT Webhook by simply front-ending the Lambda function with an AWS API Gateway, which was super easy to setup and use.

Forwarding VMC Events to Slack using Log Intelligence Webhook

06/04/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMware Log Intelligence (LINT) is a public VMware Cloud Service that is available to all VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) customers. LINT provides customers with a unified view of their SDDC infrastructure including vSphere, NSX and vSAN from a logging standpoint and LINT can also be used with an on-premises deployment. The LINT team recently published a nice overview here, which I highly recommend a read.

One really interesting capability of LINT is the alert and notification feature, which includes UI and email, but what really stood out to me with this feature is that you can also trigger a Webhook! This means you can literally integrate with any external system including public cloud services that can receive or process a Webhook. Some examples can include publishing to a specific Slack channel, sending an SMS to your SRE team, an alert in PagerDuty or even calling an AWS Lambda function. The possibilities are truly endless on what you can do with a Webhook integration!

For our recent VMC Customer Summit, I thought it would be really cool to show off some demos on what you could do with LINT Webhooks. In this blog post, I will show you how to use the If Then This That (IFTTT) service which natively supports Webhooks and publish a specific VMC event into a Slack channel. Slack also supports native webhooks, but using IFTTT, you can apply this example to other Cloud Services that you may want to integrate with.

Thunderbolt 3 enclosures with (Single, Dual & Quad) M.2 NVMe SSDs for ESXi

06/03/2019 by William Lam 7 Comments

Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) and eventually USB 4 is a really fascinating technology and I believe it still has so much untapped potential, especially when looking at Remote/Branch Office (ROBO), Edge and IoT types of deployments. TB3 was initially limited to Apple-based platforms, but in the last couple of years, adoption has been picking up across a number of PC desktop/laptops including the latest generations of Intel NUCs which are quite popular for vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Labs. My hope with USB 4 is that in the near future, we will start to see servers with this interface show up in the datacenter 🙂

In the mean time, I have been doing some work with TB3 from a home lab standpoint. Some of you may have noticed my recent work on enabling Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE for ESXi and it should be no surprise that the next logical step was TB3 storage. Using a Thunderbolt interface to connect to external storage, usually Fibre Channel is something many of our customers have been doing for quite some time. In fact, I have a blog post from a few years back which goes over some of the solutions customers have implemented, the majority use case being Virtualizing MacOS on ESXi for iOS/MacOS development. These solutions were usually not cheap and involved a sizable amount of infrastructure (e.g. storage arrays, network switches, etc) but worked very well for large vSphere/MacOS based environments.

Connecting to NSX-T Policy API using NSX-T Private IP in VMC

05/30/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

As explained in my Getting started with NSX-T Policy API in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) article, there are two ways in which you can interact with the NSX-T Policy API in VMC. The initial method is with the NSX-T Reverse Proxy which designed for initial setup including Edge Firewall and connectivity configuration (VPN/Direct Connect). Once you have enabled remote access from your network to the SDDC, you can continue using the reverse proxy method or you can connect directly to the NSX-T Manager via its private IP Address.

So how do you actually connect to the NSX-T Manager using its private IP? To be honest, this was not something I had to do before as I really like the simplicity of the reverse proxy but since this came up today in one of our VMC Slack channels, I figured I take a closer look.