WilliamLam.com

MS-A2 VCF 9.0 Lab: Configuring NSX Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

by // 1 Comment

This post is part of a short series that builds on our minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 deployment (2x Minisforum MS-A2) and showcases how to fully leverage the exciting new capabilities in the VCF 9 platform, all while maintaining a minimal resource footprint, which is ideal for lab and learning purposes.

In this blog post, we will walk through the configurations steps to enable NSX Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for our VCF 9 environment and demonstrate how to consume a VPC with your workloads.


I want to give a special shoutout to Dimitri Desmidt, who works in our Technical Marketing team and has been instrumental in helping me better understand NSX VPCs and how they work!

Here are some additional NSX VPC Resources that might be of interests if you would like to learn more:

[Read more...]

PowerCLI remediation script for running NSX Edge on AMD Ryzen for VCF 9.0

by // 1 Comment

If you are planning to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 on an AMD Ryzen processor (consumer CPU), make sure you are aware of the required workaround to get the NSX Edge node to function properly, which I had shared the solution back in 2020.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the workaround is still applicable with VCF 9.0 due to lack of support for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) with Ryzen processors. One of the challenges you could face depending on where you deploy the NSX Edge, since there is a new workflow that is built right into vCenter Server 9.0 and SSH is not enabled by default, which means you would need to go to VM Console of the NSX Edge VM to apply the workaround.


To make this even less fun, during this time the NSX Edge is going through its initialization process and because it fails to detect DPDK support, the required NSX services can not start and keeps re-trying which is not a bad thing. The reason the looping is a problem is because the workaround requires editing a configuration file and depending on how fast you can type, the initialization process will restart and cause your session to end and you now need to log back in, thus causing a less than ideal experience.

As you can probably guess, I got hit by this re-initialization loop and I just got tired of trying to be faster than the computer ?

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Retrieving NSX segment information from vCenter Server

by // Leave a Comment

Since vSphere 7.0, it has been much simpler to correlate between an NSX network segment defined in NSX Manager and its representation as a vSphere Distributed Virtual Portgroup (DVG) in vCenter Server as demonstrated in screenshot below using the vSphere UI.


With the additional NSX information such as NSX Transport Zone ID, Transport Zone ID Name, Logical Switch ID, Segment Name and VNI (Virtual Network Identifier), users can streamline debugging and troubleshooting issues with their network team by quickly providing this relevant information.

I recently had a user ask about retrieving the VNI information for a given NSX segment in vCenter Server using PowerCLI, so here is a quick snippet including other NSX information for those interested.

[Read more...]