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Quick Tip - How to deploy NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) with a single Service Engine

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I saw an interesting question today from Robert Kloosterhuis in the private vExpert App Modernization Slack Channel who working with vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) and wanted to know if it was possible to deploy NSX-ALB with just a single Service Engine (SE)?

The default behavior of NSX-ALB is to deploy two SE for availability purpose but for testing and/or homelab usage, it could certainly help with resources and time to spin up an environment using NSX-ALB. I was also curious if this was possible and reached out to NSX-ALB Engineering team and within a few minutes, I got a response that not only was this possible to do but pretty easy to configure.

To modify this default behavior, we need to update the Service Engine group prior to SE VMs being deployed. To do so, login to NSX-ALB UI and under Infrastructure->Service Engine Group and then click on the Advanced tab and change the default Buffer Service Engines value of 1 to 0 which will will have NSX-ALB deploy just a single SE VM rather than the default two.


To confirm that our NSX-ALB have been configured correctly, I have enabled vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-ALB and as you can see from the screenshot below, only a single SE VM has been deployed rather than the default behavior of two SE.

VMware 2021 Cycling Kit

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It looks like while I was out on PTO, the VMware 2021 Cycling Kits (Men/Woman) went live on VMware's official Merchandise Store. I know many of you have been asking about prior VMware Cycling Kits and you now have the opportunity to ride in style with the latest VMware 2021 Cycling Kits.

UPDATE (08/25/21) - I just found out there was a small window for ordering the cycling kits which officially ended on 8/20 and was only extended for a few more days. Unfortunately, it looks like the vendor is no longer accepting any orders. Apologies for this as I had only found out after coming back from PTO earlier this week and was not aware of the deadline.

Note: I also saw that the description for the bibs, shorts and jersey all list "LIMITED TIME", so I imagine these will not be around forever and if you are interested, definitely get your order in as soon as you can

Quick Tip - Resizing vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor Control Plane VMs

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During the enablement of vSphere with Tanzu, users can specify the size (Tiny, Small, Medium and Large) which will then dictate the amount of CPU and Memory that is allocated for the Supervisor Control Plane VMs.


After vSphere with Tanzu has been successfully enabled, you will find that only a subset of the settings can be re-configured but the Size is not one of those settings.


There was a question recently asking if you could resize the resources for the Supervisor Control Plane VMs? Although the vSphere UI does not allow you to modify the Control Plane Size value, the vSphere with Tanzu REST API can be used to perform this operation.

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