Entries from Eric Sloof

By extending the FortiGate-VM native integration with the VMware NSX-T Data Center, Fortinet delivers advanced security for east-west and north-south traffic.

This deep integration provides customers with the confidence to extend their virtualized infrastructure across multi-hypervisor environments, private, and public clouds with a unified security layer.

This joint solution enables zero-trust security across hypervisors and clouds, mitigating the lateral movement of threats and providing advanced L7 security. It also enables policy-based firewall controls on each virtualized network interface card across the data center for east-west traffic inspection. 

FortiManager has a built-in NSX-T fabric connector to enable automation and provide dynamic object updates between the VMware NSX Manager and the FortiGate-VM security nodes. 

HCIBench stands for "Hyper-converged Infrastructure Benchmark". It's essentially an automation wrapper around the popular and proven open-source benchmark tools: Vdbench and Fio that make it easier to automate testing across an HCI cluster. 

This Fling supports the most popular USB network adapter chipsets found in the market. The ASIX USB 2.0 gigabit network ASIX88178a, ASIX USB 3.0 gigabit network ASIX88179, Realtek USB 3.0 gigabit network RTL8152/RTL8153 and Aquantia AQC111U. These are relatively inexpensive devices that many of our existing vSphere customers are already using and are familiar with.

Horizon Reach is a web-based, monitoring and alerting fling for VMware Horizon On-Prem deployments. Horizon Reach is designed to tackle the disconnect in Enterprise environments wherein each Pod in a Cloud Pod Architecture is its own technology domain and fault domain or a customer is running multiple, disconnected pods, outside of a Cloud Pod Architecture, but would still like to treat them all as one unit of compute.

Kubewise is a simple multi-platform desktop client for Kubernetes®. In the same way, the kubectl command requires only a valid kubeconfig file to run commands against a Kubernetes cluster, Kubewise requires you just to configure one or more valid kubeconfig files to interact with the corresponding Kubernetes clusters.

The Horizon Helpdesk Utility is designed to be a tool used by real help desk agents. The Horizon Helpdesk Utility takes all of the functionality of the current HTML5 based Helpdesk in VMware Horizon and adds true desktop integration features

This utility allows administrators to easily apply very detailed filtering to the data and export it to a .CSV file. You can filter on time range, event severity, event source, session type (application or desktop), usernames and event types. The application allows for extremely granular export of data. The exported columns can also be customized and the application will export data from both the live and the historical tables in the View Events Database.

VMware vSAN Live provides vSAN users with instant insights into their hyper-converged infrastructure environments from their mobile devices. Instead of stopping, signing into a laptop and then logging in remotely to view their vSAN environments, users can monitor their HCI clusters while on the go, troubleshooting in just a few clicks.

Infrastructure Deployer for vCloud NFV is an automation-based deployment tool used for setting up the VMware vCloud NFV platform (NFV 3.2 VCD edition). It is based on VMware vCloud NFV 3.0 Reference Architecture design and targets greenfield deployments only.

This book provides tips that help administrators maximize the performance of VMware vSphere 6.7, Update 2. Sections cover hardware selection, ESXi and virtual machines, guest operating systems, and virtual infrastructure management.

This book is intended for system administrators who are planning a VMware vSphere 6.7 deployment and
want to maximize its performance. The book assumes the reader is already familiar with VMware vSphere
concepts and terminology

VMware has launched a new website with all the ports and protocols of their products. The URL for this new website is https://ports.vmware.com/ 

The port of the following products are listed:

• vSphere
• vSAN
• NSX Data Center for vSphere
• vRealize Network Insight
• vRealize Operations Manager
• vRealize Automation
• vCloud Availability
• vCloud Usage Meter
• VMware HCX
• Horizon 7
• Workspace ONE Access

VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized way to control and monitor the virtual infrastructure. It has been widely deployed in a remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) environment to manage ESXi hosts that are distributed over large geographical distances over a wide range of networks with different network characteristics, including low/high bandwidth, network latency, and packet error rates.

In this paper, VMware performs a comprehensive study of vCenter Server performance with a ROBO use case for the VMware vCenter 6.7 release.

They demonstrate that vCenter Server performs well in the ROBO environment for both network bandwidth use, as well as virtual machine and ESXi host task execution times. Instead of a bandwidth restriction, they observed that network latency has a bigger impact on the overall performance.

As the network latency between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts increases, the average operation latency also increases. The experimental results also show how efficiently vCenter Server executes VM operations in high-latency networks: The average VM operation execution time increases much more slowly when network latency increases by several times.

The vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) enables customers to easily create event-driven automation based on vCenter Server Events. For example, VEBA can drive basic workflows like automatically attaching a vSphere tag when a virtual machine (VM) is created.

Even more powerful integrations between datacenter-internal enterprise services and cloud services, for example, Slack and Pager Duty, can be created with VEBA out of the box.

The Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer (VMCO) is a Powershell script that uses the PowerCLI module to capture information about the hosts and VMS running in your vSphere environment, and reports back on whether the VMs are configured optimally based on the Host CPU and memory.

It will flag a VM as “YES” if it is optimized and “NO” if it is not. For non-optimized VMs, a recommendation is made that will keep the same number of vCPUs currently configured, with the optimal number of virtual cores and sockets.

Version 2.0.0

• The priority of the findings are captured
• Details on the findings are included
• Cluster information is captured to determine if Host HW is not consistent across the cluster
• Report if a VM spanning pNUMA nodes actually has the pNUMA exposed to the guest OS
• Report if advanced settings have been changed on the VM or host level to expose pNUMA to the guest OS
• Reports if the number of vCPUs for a VM exceeds the physical cores of the host (using hyperthreads as vCPUs)
• Ability to use the stand-alone “Get-OptimalvCPU” function for more flexibility

Scripting and PowerCLI are words that most people working with VMware products know pretty well and have used once or twice. Everyone knows that scripting and automation are great assets to have in your toolbox.

The problem usually is that getting into scripting appears daunting to many people who feel like the learning curve is just too steep, and they usually don't know where to start.

The good thing is you don't need to learn everything straight away to start working with PowerShell and PowerCLI. Once you have the basics down and have your curiosity tickled, you’ll learn what you need as you go, a lot faster than you thought you would!

This eBook doesn't contain everything, but it contains what you need to know to get started. Just like a mechanic’s starter kit, you can't build a car engine with it, but you can do the basics to call yourself a mechanic.

This eBook contains the first few steps of a long stairway paved with cmdlets, properties, and methods and few more treats along the way. We’ll start by covering the basics, then we’ll break the examples into sections about completing specific tasks so you can get an idea of where certain commands will be used.

Written by VMware vExpert Xavier Avrillier, this free eBook presents a use-case approach to learning how to automate tasks in vSphere environments using PowerCLI. We start by covering the basics of installation, set up, and an overview of PowerCLI terms. From there we move into scripting logic and script building with step-by-step instructions of truly useful custom scripts, including:

• How to retrieve data on vSphere objects
• Display VM performance metrics
• How to build HTML reports and schedule them
• Basics on building functions
• And more!

Stop looking at scripts online in envy because you wish you could build your own scripts. Download this eBook now and get started on your path to automation greatness!

This document provides guidance and best practices for designing environments that leverage the capabilities of VMware NSX-T. It is targeted at virtualization and network architects interested in deploying NSX Data Center solutions.

Direct download

VMware NSX-T Reference Design community 

Next-Generation Reference Design Guide for NSX-T blog post

ZeroTier is a distributed network hypervisor built atop a cryptographically secure global peer to peer network. It provides advanced network virtualization and management capabilities on par with an enterprise SDN switch, but across both local and wide area networks and connecting almost any kind of app or device.

In this video, I'll show you a demo on how to connect several devices like a cloud machine, my laptop, my iMac and my iPhone to the same layer 2 network over the internet. 

ZeroTier One uses STUN & hole punching to establish direct VPN connections between peers behind NAT and firewalls.