NSX Archives - Clouds, etc.

Infrastructure Certificate Handling Changes in VMware Cloud Director 10.3

With the release of VMware Cloud Director 10.3, there are several new additions and enhancements to this self-service platform. I’d like to talk about some of the continued security and certificate changes that one must be aware of before upgrading to 10.3.

This is an ongoing effort to simplify certificate handling, but also conform to industry security standards.

What’s New with VMware vCloud Director 10.0? (1/2)

With much excitement, VMware is announcing vCloud Director (vCD) 10.0 during VMworld US. This continues to provide significant value to our VMware Cloud Providers and tenants that consume vCD for services.

vCD 10.0 continues to demonstrate and focus on the following objectives:

A Service Delivery Platform – rapidly deploy and integrate services into a multi-tenant, scalable platform with ecosystem partnership.
Multi-Workload and Extensible Capabilities – it’s not about traditional VM’s anymore. Distinct additions like native PKS integration or next-generation virtual network services are integrated out of the box.
Intuitive User Experience – while technology can be difficult sometimes, vCD orchestrates and automates many of the backend infrastructure tasks to get services operationalized. With the new H5 interface, this is very evident.

I’m going to summarize a few items that are pertinent to this release. However, this is not this is a comprehensive list by any means. The goal of this post is to provide an overview of why each of these additions/updates matter to our service providers and consumers.

Disclaimer: while vCD 10.0 is announced as of today, features might change based on the general availability (GA) date. I’ve been working with a release candidate build for my review. Therefore, this is subject to change.

HTML5 User Interface Transition
NSX-T Support
Central Point of Management Additions

In Part 2, I will cover:

vCD Appliance Updates and Migration Path
Placement and Sizing Policies
Backup Ecosystem Certification
Miscellaneous

Hang tight, there’s a lot of information here.

NSX Edge Cluster Capability in VMware vCloud Director 9.7 – Summary

Recently, I’ve been spending time on reviewing new functionality inside of VMware vCloud Director (vCD) 9.7, specifically Edge Clusters. Edge Clusters provides distinct capabilities to control tenant Edge placement while achieving a higher level of availability. While Edges are a distinct function of NSX to control traffic that ingresses/egresses out of NSX, vCD can provide a significant level of additional functionality.

Abhinav Mishra and I have spent some time writing about the rationale, implementation, migration, and design decisions in regards to Edge Clusters in version 9.7. Below are the links to each of these respective blog posts:

Introduction to Edge Clusters in VMware vCloud Director 9.7 (Part 1 of 3)

Setting up Edge Clusters in VMware vCloud Director 9.7 (Part 2 of 3)

Edge Cluster Design and Migration Considerations for VMware vCloud Director 9.7 (Part 3 of 3)

Setting up Edge Clusters in VMware vCloud Director 9.7

Currently, I am working on some overall design content for Edge Clusters inside of VMware vCloud Director 9.7. However, I wanted to share a post on providing a step by step guide on establishing an Edge Cluster inside of vCD. I will much more to share on our corporate blog shortly, but this should start some thoughtful discussions.

Quick Intro to Edge Clusters

So what’s the deal with Edge Clusters? Edge Clusters now allow a provider to discrete control of tenant Edge placement. Previously, this was rather limited and only controlled at the Provider Virtual Data Center (pVDC) layer. With Edge Clusters, we now can establish this on a per-oVDC basis. In essence, the three main value points of Edge Clusters:

Consumption of dedicated Edge Clusters for North/South traffic – optimized traffic flow while minimizing the span of Layer 2 broadcast traffic.
Provide a higher level of availability to Edge nodes that can distinctly fail between two clusters.
Ability to balance organization Edge services between multiple Edge Clusters – I do not have to use the “same” Primary and Secondary Edge Cluster for every org VDC. This can be configured on a per orgVDC basis.

Below is a overall high level design of Edge Clusters from a physical and logical layer –