Skip to main content

Onboarding experience of VMware ON AWS in Production Environment - Part1

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, 

  1. Where do we fit this VMC in our existing infrastructure? 
  2. How could VMC bring in a value to our business 
  3. What workloads or solutions do we plan to run in this VMC? 
  4. 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 the solution, we are ready to proceed. 

What are ideal use cases of VMC? 

Since many (or almost all Fortune 500 companies) are running VMware solutions in their traditional Centre, they are most likely using or considering a move to VMware Cloud on AWS. The reason could be that they have spent a decade or more securing, hardening and operation in VMware virtual datacenter environments.  The business might look to have flatten the learning curve associated with moving to the public cloud and leverage existing skills to reduce operational overhead and expedite cloud adoptions. VMC eases that transition to public cloud by providing consistency between on-premises VMware and VMC environments. By not changing hypervisors, workload portability is easy. VMC also takes advantage of native AWS services’ power while allowing the use of existing and new apps within the VMware construct. 

So, the use cases are, 

  1. Cloud Migration 
  2. Datacenter extension 
  3. Disaster recovery 
  4. AWS integrated apps 





Onboarding process: 

VMC has a very good sales team just like any other product within VMware and these professionals reached out to me pitching this solution. Since I already had experience working with this product, it was easy for me to decide and justify the business value, use case to my management. We started the project. 

As a first step, the VMC team provides you with the checklist. In my view, we need to pay attention to the below important key-items for a successful project execution and deliver on time. 


Read more in next blog post (Link) 



Popular posts from this blog

HOW TO EDIT THE BCD REGISTRY FILE

The BCD registry file controls which operating system installation starts and how long the boot manager waits before starting Windows. Basically, it’s like the Boot.ini file in earlier versions of Windows. If you need to edit it, the easiest way is to use the Startup And Recovery tool from within Vista. Just follow these steps: 1. Click Start. Right-click Computer, and then click Properties. 2. Click Advanced System Settings. 3. On the Advanced tab, under Startup and Recovery, click Settings. 4. Click the Default Operating System list, and edit other startup settings. Then, click OK. Same as Windows XP, right? But you’re probably not here because you couldn’t find that dialog box. You’re probably here because Windows Vista won’t start. In that case, you shouldn’t even worry about editing the BCD. Just run Startup Repair, and let the tool do what it’s supposed to. If you’re an advanced user, like an IT guy, you might want to edit the BCD file yourself. You can do this

AD LDS – Syncronizing AD LDS with Active Directory

First, we will install the AD LDS Instance: 1. Create and AD LDS instance by clicking Start -> Administrative Tools -> Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services Setup Wizard. The Setup Wizard appears. 2. Click Next . The Setup Options dialog box appears. For the sake of this guide, a unique instance will be the primary focus. I will have a separate post regarding AD LDS replication at some point in the near future. 3. Select A unique instance . 4. Click Next and the Instance Name dialog box appears. The instance name will help you identify and differentiate it from other instances that you may have installed on the same end point. The instance name will be listed in the data directory for the instance as well as in the Add or Remove Programs snap-in. 5. Enter a unique instance name, for example IDG. 6. Click Next to display the Ports configuration dialog box. 7. Leave ports at their default values unless you have conflicts with the default values. 8. Click N

DNS Scavenging.

                        DNS Scavenging is a great answer to a problem that has been nagging everyone since RFC 2136 came out way back in 1997.  Despite many clever methods of ensuring that clients and DHCP servers that perform dynamic updates clean up after themselves sometimes DNS can get messy.  Remember that old test server that you built two years ago that caught fire before it could be used?  Probably not.  DNS still remembers it though.  There are two big issues with DNS scavenging that seem to come up a lot: "I'm hitting this 'scavenge now' button like a snare drum and nothing is happening.  Why?" or "I woke up this morning, my DNS zones are nearly empty and Active Directory is sitting in a corner rocking back and forth crying.  What happened?" This post should help us figure out when the first issue will happen and completely avoid the second.  We'll go through how scavenging is setup then I'll give you my best practices.  Scavenging s