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Automated Nested Lab Deployment on SDDC Part 2: Azure VMware Solution

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In Part 2 of this series, we will be taking a look at deploying our Nested Lab in an Azure VMware Solution environment. Simliar to VMConAWS, we will need to deploy our NFS Photon OS OVA because administrative access to the physical ESXi hosts is not available. This is required to enable an advanced ESXi setting to be able to run Nested vSAN on top of the physical vSAN. From a networking standpoint, customers do have full access to the NSX-T Manager instance and this means that MAC Learning can be enabled which will allow inner-guest workloads will be able to communicate properly within and outside of the Nested Lab deployment.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi is not officially supported on Azure VMware Solution or by VMware.

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Using PowerCLI and vSphere Tags to create/migrate HCX Mobility Groups to VMware Cloud SDDC

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If using your voice to create an HCX Mobility Group and initiate a migration to a VMware Cloud SDDC is not your thing, here is a more practical example using PowerCLI which includes HCX cmdlets that was introduced awhile back.


Here are the 12 configurable variables that you will need to update based on your own environment.

$VC_SERVER="vcsa.vmware.corp"
$VC_USERNAME="*protected email*"
$VC_PASSWORD="VMware1!"
$HCX_SERVER="hcx.vmware.corp"

$VSPHERE_TAG_CATEGORY="Cloud"
$VSPHERE_TAG_NAME="VMC"

# vMotion, Bulk, Cold, RAV, OsAssistedMigration
$MIGRATION_TYPE="RAV"

$TARGET_NETWORK_NAME="L2E_HOL-10-f58e483b"
$TARGET_DATASTORE_NAME="WorkloadDatastore"
$TARGET_RESOURCE_POOL_NAME="Compute-ResourcePool"
$TARGET_VM_FOLDER_NAME="Workloads"

$MOBILITY_GROUP_NAME="VMworld-2020-Demo"

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VMworld 2020 Demo - Voice activated workload migration to VMware Cloud SDDCs

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One of my favorite but also most stressful part of preparing for a VMworld session is creating the demos. Even with a "virtual" VMworld this year, I personally felt it was even more stressful than a physical VMworld.

I have been presenting with Emad Younis for a number of years now and every year, we always end up with crazy ideas without thinking through all the feasibility aspects. This year was certainly no different and while working on our demo this year, I was seriously questioning my sanity and even the actual return on investment (ROI), if such a thing exists!? 😂

In case you have not watched our session, check out HCP132: Planes, Trains and Workload Mobility, you can watch it for free and see the full demo.


I was really floored by all the positive feedback that we had received from attendees which includes the VMworld survey but also on Twitter and Slack. This was one of my favorite tweet and response 😀

We really appreciate all the feedback and it definitely made up for some of the late nights where I was about to give up. I know a few of you were asking for more details about the demo and so this blog post will be focusing on some of the information I was not able to get to during the VMworld session.

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