Eric Sloof

VMware NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) provides the capability to enforce firewalling functionality directly at the Virtual Machines (VM) vNIC layer. It is a core component of the micro-segmentation security model where east-west traffic can now be inspected at near line rate processing, preventing any lateral move type of attack.



This technical brief gives details about DFW policy rule configuration with NSX. Both DFW security policy objects and DFW consumption model will be discussed in this document. We assume reader has already some knowledge on DFW and Service Composer functions. Please refer to the appropriate collateral if you need more information on these NSX components.

VMware vRealize Log Insight delivers the best real-time and archive log management for VMware environments. Machine learning-based Intelligent Grouping and high performance search enables faster troubleshooting across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

vRealize Log Insight can analyze terabytes of logs, discover structure in unstructured data, and deliver enterprise-wide visibility using a modern Web interface.

This eLearning course describes the features of VMware vRealize Log Insight that help in the automated management of logs. The course describes how to install, configure, and use VMware vRealize Log Insight 3 to collect and analyze logs. 

This course also explains how vRealize Log Insight 3 can be integrated with other solutions for monitoring, troubleshooting, and securing a data center.

At the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Explain how vRealize Log Insight 3 delivers real-time log management for your data center and why it is important
• Deploy the vRealize Log Insight 3 virtual appliance
• Perform visual analysis of the logs to identify probable issues and troubleshoot them
• Explain the non-vSphere data sources
• Configure vRealize Operations integration with vRealize Log Insight 3

This white paper evaluates the performance of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) applications with Virtual SAN 6.2. The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure delivers desktop service to end users by running virtual machines on consolidated clusters in the datacenter.

The performance of the underlying storage solution is critical to the desktop service that VDI delivers. In this paper, we show that Virtual SAN 6.2 performs just as well as 6.1 with the VDI workload by meeting the I/O latency requirements from the applications.

At the same time, Virtual SAN 6.2 provides data integrity and disk space saving benefits to users by way of the new features at a very small CPU cost. 

Have you ever wished you could automatically get a report with all the relevant information about your VMware environments in exactly the format you want? Or that you could automate a crucial task that needs to be performed on a regular basis?

Powerful Command Line Interface (PowerCLI) scripts do all these things and much more for VMware environments. PowerCLI is a command-line interface tool used to automate VMware vSphere environments.

It is used to handle complicated administration tasks through use of various cmdlets and scripts, which are designed to handle certain aspects of VSphere servers and to help you manage them.

This book will show you the intricacies of PowerCLI through real-life examples so that you can discover the art of PowerCLI scripting. At the start, you will be taught to download and install PowerCLI and will learn about the different versions of it.

Moving further, you will be introduced to the GUI of PowerCLI and will find out how to develop single line scripts to duplicate running tasks, produce simple reports, and simplify administration. Next, you will learn about the methods available to get information remotely.

Towards the end, you will be taught to set up orchestrator and build workflows in PowerShell with update manager and SRM scripts.

• Download and install PowerCLI and its basics as well as the basics of PowerShell
• Enchance your scritping experience
• Build longer scripts and simpler reports
• Relate a task in VMware administration to a PowerCLI script
• Discover methods to acquire and change information remotely

Set up orchestrator to manage your workflow

Virtual SAN is a hypervisor-converged, software-defined storage solution for the software-defined data center. It is the first policy-driven storage product designed for VMware vSphere® environments that simplifies and streamlines storage provisioning and management.



Virtual SAN is a distributed, shared storage solution that enables the rapid provisioning of storage within VMware vCenter Server™ as part of virtual machine creation and deployment operations. Virtual SAN uses the concept of disk groups to pool together locally attached flash devices and magnetic disks as management constructs.

Disk groups are composed of at least cache device and several magnetic or flash capacity devices. In Hybrid architectures, flash devices are used as read cache and write buffer in front of the magnetic disks to optimize virtual machine and application performance. In all flash the
cache device endurance is leveraged to allow lower cost capacity devices.

The Virtual SAN datastore aggregates the disk groups across all hosts in the Virtual SAN cluster to form a single shared datastore for all hosts in the cluster. Virtual SAN requires correctly configured network for virtual machine I/O as well as communication among cluster nodes. Since the majority of virtual machine I/O travels the network due to the distributed storage architecture, highly performing and available network configuration is critical to a successful Virtual SAN deployment.

This paper gives a technology overview of Virtual SAN network requirements and provides Virtual SAN network design and configuration best practices for deploying a highly available and scalable Virtual SAN solution.