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

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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

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) 



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