Entries from Eric Sloof

The document, VMware NSX Multi-Locations Reference Design Guide for version 4.2 (by Dimitri Desmidt), outlines best practices for deploying VMware NSX across multiple locations such as data centers in different cities, campus buildings, or racks within a single facility. It provides two main solutions for multi-location setups: NSX Multisite and NSX Federation.

Key Highlights

Purpose of Multi-Location NSX

• Mobility: Seamlessly move applications across locations for disaster recovery or data center migrations.

• Growth: Accommodate increased capacity requirements.

• Disaster Recovery: Ensure application availability despite location failures.

Solution Overviews

• NSX Multisite: Centralized management using a single NSX Manager Cluster across all locations. It requires minimal infrastructure but has constraints like MTU requirements and single-location dependency for the management plane.

• NSX Federation: Decentralized management with local NSX Managers in each location and a global NSX Manager for central oversight. While it offers GDPR compliance and simpler disaster recovery, it requires more resources and has feature limitations compared to NSX Multisite.

Architecture and Deployment Options

• Details on management plane deployment (e.g., NSX Manager placement across locations).

• Data plane configurations for optimal performance and failover capabilities.

Best Practices

• Recommendations on latency thresholds, disaster recovery methods, and workload balancing.

• Emphasis on using Avi Networks for load balancing, as legacy NSX LB is deprecated.

Migration Guidance

• Steps to transition from single-location setups to multi-location configurations or between NSX Multisite and Federation solutions.

VCF Shorts are brief videos, up to 30 seconds long, showcasing highlights of VMware Cloud Foundation. These shorts are perfect for watching on your phone since they are recorded in a vertical format.

Interested? Check out my YouTube channel! I’ll be adding more shorts in the future, so stay tuned!

Workload Domain Types - Management

Workload Domain Types - VI Workload

Single Instance - Single Availability Zone

Single Instance - Multiple Availability Zones

Multiple Instances - Single Availability Zone per Instance

Multiple Instances - Multiple Availability Zones per Instance

The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2.1 poster is your ultimate guide to building and managing a modern, secure, and scalable private cloud. It highlights key components like vSAN storage, NSX networking, and advanced automation tools for seamless operations.

Explore how VCF simplifies infrastructure deployment, enhances security, and integrates with AI workloads through NVIDIA solutions. Whether you’re streamlining operations, managing workloads, or securing data, this poster gives a clear visual roadmap to maximizing your cloud infrastructure.

🔎 Download the poster and start optimizing your cloud journey today!

Recently, I took the Exam 2V0-13.24: VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 Architect exam, and I can confidently say—it’s a beast. The exam consists of 60 questions, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have about half an hour left to review your answers. During my review, I changed so many responses that I eventually just clicked "Finish" because I was afraid I might second-guess my initial, more accurate answers.

My Preparation: What Worked for Me

For preparation, I relied on the vSphere and NSX design training courses. Additionally, the VCF Design Guide was a valuable resource. However, you definitely shouldn't overlook topics like Aria Automation and Aria Operations. It also doesn’t hurt to explore HCX, and vSphere IaaS Control Plane is another subject that shouldn’t be ignored.

I went into the exam with relatively little preparation, mainly to see what kinds of questions would be asked. Honestly, I didn’t expect to pass but wanted to gain insight into how I could better prepare. To my surprise, I passed!

What Helped Me Succeed?

I must admit, the exam really pushed me to my limits. Fortunately, with over 15 years of experience delivering design training, I had a bit of an advantage when it came to concepts like risks, assumptions, and constraints. It’s also crucial to quickly identify whether a question is related to performance, availability, or recoverability. Understanding terms like RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and MTD (Maximum Tolerable Downtime) is equally important.

On top of that, you need to know the deployment types possible with VCF—whether it’s Stretched, Isolated, or a combination of both. These details can really make a difference during the exam.

A Fair but Tough Exam

One thing I appreciate about this exam is that it’s fair. There are no tricky word games or double negatives—it's all about your knowledge and understanding. But is it challenging? Absolutely.

If you’re planning to take the VCF Architect exam, I highly recommend focusing not only on the technical aspects but also on design principles and best practices. Good luck!

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 Architect Exam (2V0-13.24)

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Exam Prep

This technical document provides best practices and configuration guidance for implementing VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) in a Metro/Stretched Storage Cluster environment using vSphere 8. It explores how to properly configure vSphere High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and storage components across two data centers to ensure workload availability and balanced resource usage. The paper also details various failure scenarios and their handling, emphasizing the importance of proper site affinity configuration and VASA Provider availability for optimal cluster performance.

This guide provides comprehensive documentation of the considerations and configuration steps required for using VMware Live Site Recovery (VLSR) to protect and recover a reference multi-tiered set of business-critical applications from a source VMware datacenter (on-premises or cloud-based) to a supported target VMware datacenter (on-premises or cloud-based), with the least cost (time, financial, and administrative intervention) possible. 

VMware vSGA, powered by the Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series, delivers a scalable, high-performance shared 3D graphics solution on VMware ESXi. VMware has evaluated its performance using applications like Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, WebGL, web video, and CAD viewers. The results showed that vSGA provides a superior user experience compared to a CPU-only 3D graphics stack and achieves performance levels comparable to SR-IOV on the Intel Data Center GPU Flex 140.

Overview

The VMware Cloud Foundation Automation ABX Actions for Ansible Automation Platform Deployment Guide offers step-by-step instructions for installing and configuring sample ABX actions. These actions facilitate seamless integration between VMware Aria Automation and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Intended Audience

This guide is tailored for data center cloud administrators responsible for managing VMware Cloud Foundation Automation environments within their organizations. Readers are expected to have expertise in the following areas:

• VMware Cloud Foundation Automation: Skills in administering, configuring, and using VMware Cloud Foundation Automation Assembler.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: Proficiency in creating and managing users, organizations, and integrating with version control platforms such as GitLab and GitHub.
• Python 3: Practical knowledge of Python 3 and its packages.

Overview

The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Automation ABX Actions for Ansible Automation Platform Deployment Guide provides comprehensive instructions for leveraging the sample Aria custom resource to interact with the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform effectively.

Intended Audience

This guide is designed for experienced data center cloud administrators and automation developers who work with VMware Aria Automation to create automated solutions for their organizations. Familiarity with the following technologies and concepts is essential:

• VMware Aria Automation: Expertise in using and developing with Aria Automation Assembler.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: Proficiency in managing users, organizations, and integrating with version control platforms like GitLab and GitHub. Understanding Ansible inventories and components, as well as developing and using playbooks for configuration management.
• Python 3: A solid understanding of Python 3 and its associated packages.
• YAML: Familiarity with YAML syntax and data types.

High performance computing (HPC) environments are crucial to innovation today. They drive drug discovery, electronic design automation, digital movie rendering, and deep learning—just to name a few of the many applications. At the same time, an ever-growing need for security is pushing HPC environments from the physical world to the virtual.

Traditional bare-metal HPC systems are unable to meet the requirements for dynamic sharing and isolation of resources, making them incapable of supporting secure multi-tenancy. Aging infrastructures further escalate security concerns. One of the key benefits virtualization offers to the enterprise is enhanced network security. Virtualized HPC environments also provide significant value, allowing IT teams to leverage multi-tenancy to maximize hardware utilization while maintaining complete separation between research projects, ensuring files and data remain private.

While public clouds offer a variety of security policies, challenges related to security and management flexibility still persist. This is especially evident in areas such as clinical genomic sequencing, chip design, and other sensitive research fields that undergo regulatory compliance and demand the highest levels of security. To address these challenges, modern HPC environments require a software-defined networking solution that delivers robust security and streamlines security operations.

In this paper, VMware leverages VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and one of its core components, NSX-T Data Center, for HPC workloads. A multi-tenant networking architecture is presented, along with an evaluation of HPC application performance when paired with various NSX-T features, including micro-segmentation with the distributed firewall (DFW), encapsulation with GENEVE overlay, and the NSX enhanced data path (ENS)/network stack. Finally, VMware provides a list of best practices.