WilliamLam.com

Quick Tip - Avoid network conflicts with Docker Bridge Network on the vCenter Cloud Gateway for vSphere+/vSAN+

by // Leave a Comment

The new vSphere+/vSAN+ cloud service is now generally available for all customers! For those interested, I recently wrote about my first experience using the new vSphere+vSAN+ service with my vSphere Homelab environment, which I will also be updating based on the generally available service.

In addition to the resources above and in the VMC Cloud Console, here is a link to the official vSphere+/vSAN+ documentation including pre-req.

During my initial deployment of the vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) used by the vSphere+/vSAN+ service, I did not run into any issues but upon deploying my second VCGW for a different environment, I ran into some networking issues. After a bit of debugging, I came to learn  that the VCGW application and services are composed of various Docker containers and there was a network conflict with the default Docker Bridge Network that the VCGW has been configured by default with.

[Read more...]

How to change the default CPU and Memory requirements for deploying the VMC vCenter Cloud Gateway

by // 3 Comments

When deploying the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCG), there is a minimum amount of vCPU and memory that is required for deployment. For customers who wish to evaluate this solution for non-production usage, such as a lab environment, it would be nice to be able to reduce the requirements purely for testing purposes. Today, the vCPU and Memory is not configurable and is currently encoded within a JSON configuration file as well as the VCG OVA. The fact that this is not part of the installer itself but within the OVA means we can actually change the default 🙂 Below are the instructions for updating the vCPU and Memory requirements for the VCG.

Step 1 - Download the VCG ISO from MyVMware and extract the ISO.

[Read more...]

Enhancements to Hybrid Linked Mode (HLM) in VMC using the new vCenter Cloud Gateway

by // Leave a Comment

It has been almost a year since VMware introduced the Hybrid Linked Mode (HLM) capability, which provides customers with a consistent operating experience for managing and consuming resources from both their on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) environments. Feedback from customers on HLM has been fantastic, especially when new or prospective VMC customers learn about HLM for the very first time. Customers were pleasantly surprised at how seamless the experience was when consuming VMC resources, using a familiar interface, the vSphere UI.

Here is a quick recap of what HLM provides today:

  • HLM allows customers to link a single VMC instance to a single on-prem SSO Domain which can contain one or more vCenter Servers (Enhanced Linked Mode) while maintaining separate administrative domains (e.g. on-prem user is Administrator while VMC user is CloudAdmin only)
  • SSO Domains will be different between on-prem and VMC, however it is a 1:1 relationship
  • A trust is established where the on-prem vCenter Server trusts the incoming connections from VMC as they share the same Active Directory identity source. Data is sync'ed uni-directionally from on-prem to VMC
  • Can be configured at any point in the on-prem vCenter Server lifecycle, no restrictions to initial install and can easily be un-linked unlike ELM
  • Both Embedded & External vCenter Server deployments are supported
  • HLM supports different versions of vCenter Server between on-prem (6.5d+) and VMC, especially as VMC will almost always run a newer version of vSphere
  • Users MUST login to VMC vCenter Server for single-pane of glass management (H5 Client supported only), logging into on-prem vCenter Server will NOT show VMC vCenter Server
  • Roles are NOT replicated due to the restrictive access model in VMC

[Read more...]