My IT Blog

Posts

Optimising Hybrid Cloud Environments with Broadcom and VMware

Introduction : Hybrid cloud environments are becoming increasingly popular among enterprises due to their flexibility, cost-efficiency, and disaster recovery capabilities. Broadcom and VMware, two industry leaders, offer robust solutions that can optimize hybrid cloud environments. This article explores how their technologies can be integrated to enhance performance, scalability, and security. Understanding Hybrid Cloud : Hybrid cloud environments combine private and public cloud resources, allowing businesses to leverage the best of both worlds. Key benefits include: Flexibility: Easily scale resources up or down based on demand. Cost-Efficiency: Optimize costs by using public cloud resources for non-sensitive workloads. Disaster Recovery: Ensure business continuity with robust disaster recovery solutions. Broadcom’s Contributions: Broadcom provides a range of technologies that support hybrid cloud environments, including: Network Switches: Broadcom’s Trident 4 switch ASIC offe

Broadcom’s Acquisition of VMware: What It Means for the Future of Cloud Computing

Introduction: Broadcom’s recent acquisition of VMware for $61 billion marks a significant milestone in the tech industry. This merger is set to reshape the landscape of cloud computing, bringing together Broadcom’s hardware prowess and VMware’s software expertise. In this post, we will delve into the details of the acquisition, its impact on VMware’s product line, and the broader implications for cloud computing. Background of the Acquisition: The acquisition deal, announced in May 2022, is one of the largest in the tech sector. Broadcom, known for its semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions, has strategically acquired VMware to enhance its software portfolio. This move follows Broadcom’s previous acquisitions of CA Technologies and Symantec’s enterprise security business, highlighting its aggressive expansion strategy. Impact on VMware’s Product Line : VMware’s core products, including vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and VMware Cloud Foundation, are expected to see significant enh

VMware on AWS - How to restore NSX DFW firewall rules to previous state

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, with the current setting

[How to] Enable Multi-cast in VMware on AWS - NSX environment

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 multicast, let's check i

Implement and configure AWS Backup for VMware Cloud on AWS VM workloads

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 10. For Security group , sel