blogposts

This blogpost discusses how the consumer-provider microsegmentation model works, its strengths and weaknesses, and why you might want to consider using this for your future micro-segmentation strategies.

In some recent engagements i’ve been involved in getting my customers started with a microsegmentations strategy, and one of the more obvious requests from people new to microsegmentation is to start with their infrastructure.

A very brief one, but for a current project i’m working on LCM in a heavily locked down environment. So locked down in fact that even RDP to the servers is impossible, which makes making changing slightly impractical as everything has to go through the console.

Recently, a customer of mine needed to modify a large number of vRA reservations to facilitate a migration, and because there’s nothing wrong with being lazy, using powershell is always one of my go-to options.

Note: As this is more of a reminder for myself so i don’t forget next time, don’t expect too much fluff. Last week i needed to demonstrate how to temporarily enable firewall rules using the NSX DFW for a customer use case that is pretty serious about zero trust policies.

if you’ve read my previous blog post about NSX-T, you should know the basics of what NSX-T does and why it’s the best thing since mankind invented rocket surgery. In this post we’ll try to give you a brief overview of the steps to take to deploy NSX-T in your lab environment the easy way.

note: header image shameless stolen from XKCD . Credit where credit is due Once upon a time - as any good story is supposed to begin - people were working in IT.

With a fresh new year comes a fresh new set of VPS hosts, and as a resolution i’m planning to fully deploy these through ansible, along with migrating a lot of my existing machines to ansible as well.

As most of you are probably aware by now, i’ve moved to Dubai to work for VMware. By now, it’s been a bit over a week so i thought i might as well provide everyone back at home (or wherever you are) with an update.

Currently i’m working on a NSX project involving a large amount of networks and a complicated firewall setup that needs to be migrated to NSX. Using tools such as vRealize Network insight for traffic flow insight helps a lot, but ultimately the DFW onboarding process needs to be SMART, and specifically the following:

A fresh new ghost installation means a fresh new layout. It’s currently partially under development, but most features should be working. So if you have any feedback, bugs, items that aren’t working or any other criticism, i’d be glad to hear it.

For a project i’m currently working on we are using vRealize Log Insight as a logging and monitoring solution. One of the important requirements this customer has is the forwarding of syslog events to HP Arcsight, a SIEM solution.

Most of you that are reading this will either have their own lab, or a corporate lab environment, and - most likely - regularly install a variety of vendor products to try out new products, test new features, create demo environments for customers, study for certifications, and more.

For those that regularly read XKCD, this one may be familiar for you: Let me start from the beginning. My previous employer OGD has a yearly event called “Technival”, which was all about a wild variety of geeky things organised and built by their employees, and the Virarium was the brainchild of me and Robbert Erents .

Since my last tweet and blogpost on a bug in NSX-T when deploying on a nested ESXi host , i’ve had a few requests from people to describe the actual lab setup used, the procedure and a quick-and-dirty guide to get started with NSX-T on vSphere.

As today was a lab day for the first time in a long while, i decided to finally get around to finishing my NSX-T nested lab. So after deploying the manager and controller cluster, the time comes to prepare the ESXi hosts.

For a project i’m currently working on, we need to provide a full end-to-end validation of the NSX routing, distributed firewall rules and VXLAN functionality. As the amount and complexity of firewall rules are quite significant, i’ve written a script that allows you to run and retrieve data from NSX Traceflow in an automated fashion, which can be found at https://bitbucket.

Full Disclosure: This blogpost is written for and part of the VMware vExpert NSX Certification blogging campaign. A long long time ago when i was still making my first steps in the wonderful world of IT, my role was that of the go-to operations guys for small-medium businesses.

Currently i’m working on a NSX project that involves automation of NSX loadbalancers to provide loadbalancing as a catalog item. Now, while i would normally prefer deploying dedicated loadbalancers on-demand, a big constraint in this environment is the fact that the ISP takes a significant time to configure the GSLB for new services, so on-demand loadbalancers go straight out of the window.

TL;DR: if you’re just interested in how to configure orchestrator to allow puppetDB querying, follow the link . PuppetDB is an extension to Puppet allowing you to aggregate data from Puppet nodes such as custom facts, catalogs and resources.