VCF

One thing I like to do whenever I bring up a new cluster, is to enable EVC on it. The past years I’ve seen mixed generation clusters a lot and there’s no reason to leave it disabled on new clusters. Doing it at deploy will save you A LOT of headaches down the line, having to power off an entire cluster is no fun. Something I found out recently is that the VCF Installer does not enable EVC during the deployment of a new VCF environment, you also can’t make the installer do it through the API. This is outlined in this Broadcom KB. The KB tells us how we can enable EVC during the deployment phase, but what if, like me, you only find out after deployment? And what if this happens on your management cluster, and vCenter also doesn’t have EVC enabled? Well, we can use per-vm EVC for that! ...

This morning I was deploying the new Protection and Recovery appliance for a customer. I decided to follow the vCenter deployment flow, filled in all the details in the ovf deployment wizard and waited for the deployment to complete. To my surprise, the appliance (in both datacenters) never came online with the details I had configured. They both came online with a link-local IPv6 address, no IPv4 address and no configured hostname or passwords that worked. ...

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time getting our company lab set up and configured with all the bells and whistles that VCF 9 brings to the table. The new SSO experience was something I was really looking forward to. Previously, you had to configure the identity provider for every single product and platform, then add in the permissions and then manage that connection seperately. The new SSO experience, powered by the all new Identity Broker, is supposed to alleviate a lot of that management overhead. ...

When I first installed VCF in the lab, I decided to skip Automation for now so that I could read up on it a bit. Today, I was trying to install it through VCF Operations in the lifecycle tab, but the pre-checks kept failing with a pretty ambiguous error message. When testing DNS resolution, for the record that was mentioned, it resolved fine on my jumphost and laptop. So I figured the issue must be with DNS resolution on the Fleet manager appliance (ex-SDDC manager). I connected to the fleet manager appliance and tested DNS resolution there. ...

Today is the day a lot of people have been looking forward to for a long time. Ever since VMware by Broadcom announced VCF 9 at VMware Explore Las Vegas 2024, people have been wondering what this release would be like. I was one of those people as well. Over the past few weeks, during the beta program, and during a briefing we got through the vExpert program, a lot was made clear. ...