My IT Blog

As a technical architect, I recently had the opportunity to work with a customer who was facing significant challenges with their IT infrastructure. They were struggling with resource allocation, performance bottlenecks, and network reliability. Here’s how we leveraged VMware Tanzu and NSX to transform their environment. The Challenge My customer, a mid-sized enterprise, was experiencing rapid growth. Their existing infrastructure was unable to keep up with the increasing demands. They had over-provisioned resources, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs. Additionally, their network lacked the necessary segmentation and security measures, making it vulnerable to potential threats. The Solution We decided to implement VMware Tanzu for managing their Kubernetes clusters and NSX for enhancing network reliability and security. Here’s how we approached the project: 1. Workload Analysis: We began by conducting a thorough analysis of their workloads. Using VMware vRealize Operations,...

Customers who uses NSX day-in, day-out would like to have a point-in time restore functionality of DFW firewall rules. Many customer have a large footprints in VMC and make changes to DFW quite often. This feature was missing for long time and we could see its included in recent versions . Let's see how DFW configuration roll back works  NSX DFW configuration has versioning, and it is stored in the NSX Manager.  Every time when someone update DFW configuration, NSX creates one more version but keep storing the previous ones. You can rollback for previous config but reapplying it once again.  You can find the options under Networking & Security tab , > Security > Distributed Firewall . In the right side we see an Actions drop down. Choose View to get to the below screen.  Let’s go through the use case:  1. Original state- default config with no custom rules:  a. There are no saved configurations during last 30 days: In my existing test setup, ...

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...