Adding a Second Site – Running in Ravello Cloud – to my Homelab using pfSense and OpenVPN

21. February 2019 Homelab, SDDC 0
Adding a Second Site – Running in Ravello Cloud – to my Homelab using pfSense and OpenVPN
Introduction In my homelab, I’m currently running a fully nested VMware environment in a single box. With the necessary tweaking and tuning, and thanks to fast NVME SSD storage, I can quite comfortably run 6 ESXi hosts concurrently. 4 Nodes with vSAN are running the management cluster (non-stop), and two 2-node clusters with NFS storage (provided ...

Using CertGenVVD to install a custom SSL certificate on vRealize Network Insight (vRNI)

08. October 2018 SDDC 2
Using CertGenVVD to install a custom SSL certificate on vRealize Network Insight (vRNI)
Introduction I am currently deploying a VMware Validated Design for SDDC at a customer, with the addition of vRealize Network Insight. This blogpost explains how to use the Certificate Generation Utility for VMware Validated Design for Software-Defined Data Center (CertGenVVD utility) to replace the default SSL certificate of the vRNI Platform Appliance. CertGenVVD is a command-line utility ...

Adding NSX-T to my nested VMware homelab

Adding NSX-T to my nested VMware homelab
Nested homelab and NSX-T I recently published a blogpost about my fully nested VMware homelab.After completing a beta NSX-T Install, Configure and Manage course, I was  keen on adding NSX-T to the mix. The beauty of NSX-T is that it is not hard coupled to vCenter Server. By simply adding another (nested) ESXi host to ...

NSX Distributed Firewall and “Enable TCP Strict”

23. April 2018 NSX 1
NSX Distributed Firewall and “Enable TCP Strict”
NSX DFW Enable TCP Strict Today, I finally had some time to dive a bit deeper into the 6.4.0 release of NSX for vSphere. When I was configuring the Distributed Firewall, I noticed a setting called ‘Enable TCP Strict” which I didn’t immediately recognize. After some investigation, it became clear that this setting strengthens the ...

My NSX one-arm load balancing epiphany

19. December 2017 NSX, SDDC 0
My NSX one-arm load balancing epiphany
Common load balancing topologies Sometimes you stumble across something so obvious that you cannot believe you missed it. I had such a moment today. I have been discussing load balancing topologies with one of my customers in the last few days and in each discussion we stayed exactly within the predefined color lines: a one-arm ...