NSX Security lab available in VMware TestDrive

What is VMware TestDrive VMware Hands-On Labs (HOL) have been around for quite some time and are well-known within the VMware ecosystem. What many people don’t know is that VMware also offers “fully configured, enterprise grade, and integrated” environments to test and explore VMware’s full suite of products in VMware TestDrive. Where VMware HOL are ...

Deploying NSX Advanced Load Balancer (aka Avi) in my homelab

Deploying NSX Advanced Load Balancer (aka Avi) in my homelab
VMware acquired Avi Networks in the summer of 2019 to add Software-Defined ADC (Application Distribution Controller) capabilities to their Virtual Cloud Network portfolio. That’s a fancy way of saying they bought the most awesome load balancing, WAF and container ingress traffic management solution in the market. VMware rebranded Avi Networks Load Balancer to VMware NSX ...

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 ...

NSX Distributed Firewall and “Enable TCP Strict”

23. April 2018 NSX, VMware 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, VMware 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 ...