My IT Blog

I had a customer who were running few application VMs in their on-premises datacenter which uses multicasting as main mechanism in order to form cluster blocks. They are in process of migrating the workloads from On-premises to VMware on AWS SDDCs. The application Architect wanted to ensure that the VMC supports multicasting within AWS VMC so that they migrate the VMS ( Life & Shift) without major downtime/config changes to their applications clusters. Let's see how things works within VMC world In VMC setup the Multi casting feature is enabled by default. In SDDC networks, layer 2 multicast traffic is treated as broadcast traffic on the network segment where the traffic originates. It is not routed beyond that segment.   VMC Limitation:  Optimisation features such as IGMP snooping are not supported.  Layer 3 multicast (such as  Protocol Independent Multicast) is not supported in VMware Cloud on AWS.   In the above example case, the customer has L2 mul...

In our previous post we saw the design of the AWS Backup on VMC. In this post we’re going through the implementation steps As per the design and best practice, we are going to use the ENI for the Backup traffic CREATE A VPC ENDPOINT  TO CREATE AN INTERFACE ENDPOINT FOR AN AWS SERVICE 1. Open the Amazon VPC console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc    2. In the navigation pane, choose Endpoints 3. Choose Create endpoint 4. Name the endpoint   5. For Service category, choose AWS services 6. For Service name, search “ Backup ” and select “ backup-gateway ” service from the dropdown 7. For VPC, select the VPC which we used for SDDC deployment and extension 8. To create an interface endpoint for Amazon S3, you must “uncheck” Additional settings, Enable DNS name. This is because Amazon S3 does not support private DNS for interface VPC endpoints 9. For  Subnets , select one subnet per Availability Zone which we used for SDDC VMC selection...

This blog post provides the high level design for implementing the Native AWS Backup to protect the VMware Workloads hosted on VMware Cloud on AWS.  VMware Cloud on AWS VMware Cloud on AWS enables customers to deploy the SDDC and consume vSphere workloads as a managed service on AWS global infrastructure. VMC is a jointly engineered solution by VMware and AWS that provides customers with a true hybrid cloud experience. As customers continue to adopt VMware Cloud on AWS, data protection for the VMs and workloads hosted on the VMC SDDC is becoming increasingly important. Customers should also be able to comply with data regulations and manage backup costs effectively. This post will go over the design considerations and best practices for enabling Native AWS Backup for VMs hosted on VMC SDDC. We'll go over different architecture design options and use cases that address customer needs. AWS Backup for VMware We can centrally protect our VMware workloads hosted on VMC SDDC thanks to A...

One of my customers are in the journey of migrating the workloads from On-Premise Datacenter to VMware Cloud on AWS. They have a 6 node VMC SDDC brought up and they are connected via a VPN tunnel over the public Internet. They also have HCX deployed on premise with multiple stretched networks and two HCX Service Meshes. The existing service meshes was created over the HCX VPN tunnel for the workload migration. Due to the fact that the customer is now planning for the mass VM migration from On-Premise to VMC, they decided to go with Direct Connect (AWS Direct Connect)  In this blog spot, I share the steps we performed.  Architecture:  We have setup the Direct Connect between On-Prem and AWS Datacenter and the connections are made available in AWS network account. Then created the Transit Virtual interfaces and associated with the Direct connect gateway ( detailed steps here ). Then attach the Direct Connect Gateway to an SDDC group steps here.    The high-level a...

As per Gartner, 100 percent of Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 100 companies use VMware , and more than 500,000 customers have saved billions of dollars worldwide. Approximately 85 percent of all virtualized applications run on VMware.  Many companies still rely on their own data centers and manage their IT infrastructure with long-standing, proven solutions from VMware. But many would also like to benefit from the advantages of a public cloud solution, such as high scalability, reliability, and flexible costs. This is made possible with VMware Cloud on AWS . It enables companies to bring their vSphere-based workloads into the public cloud and combine them with modern services from AWS, such as S3 object storage or an RDS database service, if required. Why move to Cloud:  Common scenarios include  1. Company strategy to implement cloud-first mandates 2. Aging infrastructure or major hardware refreshes 3. Expiring contracts or co-location lease expiration 4.  ...

 VMware ON AWS Deployment - Requirements.  As mentioned in the previous post , when we are set with the project objective, we need to prepare the items mentioned in the VMC deployment checklist. Some of the basic requirements are,  The AWS account details - When we deploy our SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS, it is created within an AWS account and a VPC dedicated to your organisation and managed by VMware. We must also connect the SDDC to an AWS account belonging to us, called the customer AWS account . This connection allows our SDDC to access AWS services belonging to our org  account. SDDC Management subnets - This is the most critical part of the deployment. Choosing the right network for SDDC and connect back to ON-Premise network (check with network team to make sure you provide unique range of CIDR, ASN etc to avoid conflicts)  Connectivity to On-Premise DC and VMC - There are different ways to connect to the On-Prem DC, using IPsec VPN, AWS Direct Connect...

I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy   During this pandemic time, I have got a chance to onboard the VMware ON AWS to another location of our business. In this blog series I will share my experience and few tips about VMware ON AWS (VMC). This is purely my view and the intention are to spread the views to the community. If you have any issues, comments, feedback kindly share via email. Let’s get straight to the topic.  Why VMC:  Before we go choose to proceed with VMC, we need to understand and convince ourselves on below items,  Where do we fit this VMC in our existing infrastructure?  How could VMC bring in a value to our business  What workloads or solutions do we plan to run in this VMC?  Do we have a DR requirement? If yes, do we have an existing setup to migrate to VMC or its going to be a new DR setup?  Like this you might have to ask few questions which you might need to address it. When we have a problem statement and ...