2019 on iThinkVirtual™

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 6: Upgrading NSX-T

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:25 -0400

Intro

Welcome to Part 6 of my NSX-T Home Lab series. In my previous post, I covered how to configure NSX-T networking to be able to start migrating and running workloads on the NSX-T fabric. In this post, I am going to cover the process of upgrading to the newly released version of NSX-T 2.4. Are you excited? Good!… So am I! Let’s jump right in!

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 5: Configuring NSX-T Networking

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 17:25:44 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 5 of my NSX-T Home Lab series. In my previous post, I went over the lengthy process of configuring the NSX-T fabric. In this post, I am going to cover the process of configuring the networking so we can get the logical routers and logical switches in place and ready to attach VMs to them and begin running workloads on NSX. Let get to it, shall we?

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 4: Configuring NSX-T Fabric

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 15:15:18 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 4 of my NSX-T Home Lab series. In my previous post, I covered the process of deploying the NSX-T appliances and joining them to the management plane to have the foundational components ready for us to continue the configuration. In this post, I will cover all the configurations required to get NSX-T Fabric ready for network configurations in order to run workloads on it. So sit back, buckle up, and get ready for a lengthy read!

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 3: Deploying NSX-T Appliances

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 23:22:25 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 3 of my NSX-T Home Lab Series. In my previous post, I went over the process of setting up the Sophos XG firewall/router VM for my nested lab environment. In this post, we’ll cover the process of deploying the required NSX-T Appliances. There are 3 main appliances that need to be deployed, the first is the NSX-T Manager, followed by a single or multiple Controllers, and lastly, a single or multiple Edge appliances. For the purposes of this nested lab demo, I will only be deploying a single instance of each appliance, but please follow recommended best practices if you are leveraging this series for a production deployment. With all that said, let’s get to it!

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 2: Configuring ESXi VMs

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 22:11:56 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 2 of my NSX-T Home Lab Series. In my previous post, I went over the installation and configuration of a Sophos XG firewall for my nested NSX-T Home Lab. In this post, I will cover the setup and configuration of the ESXi 6.7 VMs.

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 1: Configuring Sophos XG Firewall

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 22:10:49 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 1 of my NSX-T Home Lab Series. In my previous post, I went over the gist of what I plan to do for my nested NSX-T Home Lab. In this post, I will cover the setup and configuration of a Sophos XG firewall Home Edition which will serve as the router for my nested lab environment. My physical Home Lab is configured with Virtual Distributed Switches, or VDS (sometimes seen as DVS) for short, and since this is a nested lab environment that will not have any physical uplinks connected, I will need to create a new VDS without physical uplinks connected to it along with a portgroup for the nested environment and then configure access to the environment from my LAN. All traffic will flow through virtual router/firewall to communicate to and from the nested lab.

NSX-T Home Lab Series

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 22:09:16 -0500

Intro

I recently upgraded my Home Lab “Datacenter” to support all-flash VSAN and 10Gb networking with the plan to deploy NSX-T so that I can familiarize myself with the solution and use it to better prepare me for the VMware VCP-NV exam certification. Since this is all brand new to me, I’ve decided that I’ll first deploy it in a nested lab environment in order to learn the deployment process as well as to minimize the risk of accidentally messing up my Home Lab environment.

Create an ESXi 6.7 VM Template

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 21:21:31 -0500

Disclaimer: The following is not supported by VMware.

Nested virtualization is nothing new, and many of us use it for test or demonstration purposes since they can quickly be stood up or torn down. William Lam has an ESXi VM which can be downloaded from here, but I wanted to go ahead and create my own for use within my nested lab environments.

A Dream Come True!!

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 22:41:27 -0500

First off, let me start by apologizing for my long hiatus. I took some time away from blogging to focus on some personal matters as well as my career development and advancement. But here were are, brand new year, and a brand new me!