Tag Archives: vmware

NSX

My VCP-NV Experience

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vcp-nv

As most VMware Pros will have heard the VCP-NV (Network Virtualisation) exam is out and is primarily all about NSX. Since the announcement I’ve been doing some reading up on it and took a hands on lab to get a better understanding about how it all works. Today I sat the exam and thankfully had done enough to pass.

While I will admit to being a bit of a VMware cert junkie, the recent VCP-NV coincided with my day to day job where I’ve been also recently evaluating various virtual routing products such as the Brocade 5400/5600 vRouters, the Cisco 1000v + ASA Cloud Gateway and currently NSX. This was from a starting point of the the incumbent VCNS & vShield Edge devices underpinning the private cloud I use daily. This gave me a bit of an advantage in the exam as I am well aware of the vShield edge capabilities and how VXLAN works.

Anyway onto the exam itself… This is not an exam for the networking novice and certainly it helps if you’re up to a CCNA level of knowledge. The 120 questions you face are all based on the exam blueprint but not all directly relate to NSX itself. There’s plenty of ‘low hanging fruit’ by knowing:

  • …the differences between a vSS and vDS
  • …what a VTEP is
  • …what a ‘mtu’ has to do with networking
  • …what multicast is and its limitations
  • …the upgrade path to NSX 6
  • …what the difference is between traditional edge networking and the new world of distributed routers and firewalls
  • …that you don’t need vSphere to use NSX. You can happily run it over KVM and/or XEN and get the same network abstraction

Getting through the study in the two weeks meant getting very familiar with the NSX design guide, the admin guide and the installation guide. I also found the VMware lab, HOL-SDC-1303,  to be an invaluable resource.

As final preparation for the exam I went through Paul McSharry’s excellent VCP-NV sample exams and the VMware supplied sample exam.

Also I should add, as an excellent foundation for vSphere networking you really should check out Chris Wahl and Stephen Pantol’s book Networking for VMware Administrators.

Best of luck in going for the VCP-NV, it’s a nice challenge and I really know NSX a lot better than I did. It’s just a shame that the closest you can get to play with the product is in a HOL and not in your home lab. Maybe someday soon…

VCD, VCHS

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – My Impressions

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VCHS LogoOver the last 6 weeks I’ve had a unique opportunity  to try out the European implementation of VCHS (multi-tenant Organisation, not the DC version). It was part of a client exploration of public Cloud  and of course there was a particular use case that needed to be satisfied. I’m not going to comment on that use case but only from my personal point of view of the service. During the Beta period it was a VCD 5.1 installation however it recently changed to a VCD 5.5 interface and now allows for the newer features such as the versioning of templates in the catalog.

Firstly there is the interface. Instead of logging in via the regular VCD interface there’s a clean dashboard view which I would suggest is aimed at managers to view consumption of the service and also for novice users who don’t need complicated vApp designs (think fenced networks and multi-tiered vApps) and just want a VM to play with. Frankly as an experienced vCloud techie I just skipped past it and went straight into the VCD interface. As you would expect you’re presented with a regular Organisational view and all the trappings there of. Authentication into VCD is done via the initial VCHS portal which is a bit of a shame as you have to pass through the initial dashboard interface first.

The speed of instantiating a VM seemed snappy and quite usable. There was no way to tell if Fast Provisioning was on for our Org vDC however the test deployments I conducted of one of the VMWare supplied CentOS 6 templates seemed to be on a par with a full clone having been conducted on the back end, taking around 30 seconds before it was ready to be powered on.

From a networking point of view it was simply an implementation of a VCD Edge (in Private Cloud) connecting to another VCD Edge (in VCHS) via an SSL VPN. Very straight forward and quick to implement. The challenge then is to make sure your core network routing tables are setup so that all traffic destined for the VMs in VCHS is relayed back and forth without issue. Not a small task but fairly straightforward for the network guys involved.

From the testing I conducted it was pretty quick to deploy 50 VMs to the point of login within 15mins however it should be noted that the when I deployed all the VMs in one go the backend system seemed to stagger the deployments and not do it all in parallel. This is pretty typical of the behaviour of vCenter when asked to clone multiple VMs at the same time. It implies that the limitations in our private vSphere stacks seem to be the same as in VCHS, i.e. VMWare may not have tuned the cloning process to conduct more clones in parallel. This might have changed when they upgraded to 5.5 at launch so I’m reserving judgement on that one!

From an API point of view you still can use orchestrate via VCO your deployments as the vCloud plugin was as usable in our Private cloud as it was in VCHS. I was executing using the 5.1 schema and there was no obvious issues that caused deployments to fail. Not surprising of course but the box has been ticked on that one. Using vFabric Application Director (vFAD) and setting the endpoint as VCHS caused no discernible difference in deployments other than our private cloud deployments being around 10% faster than VCHS.

My only wish for VCHS was that it was as open to the public to use just as easily as AWS. From what I could see on the VCHS site you must have a member of VMWare’s sales team contact you for access to VCHS. While the service is being obviously targeted to the enterprise user there are guys like myself who would like to hook up their personal private clouds to an external provider on a PAYG basis. I’d happily hand over a credit card and pay a small subscription cost for an Org vDC and then PAYG for any deployed VMs. I can only hope that this will be the logical progression as I think VMWare may miss a trick with Startups and with Dev teams who need to burst into cloud for a Sprint. I’ve seen how small dev teams who, armed with the bosses credit card, can just deploy a bunch of VMs in AWS on a Monday morning and be developing their latest app by lunchtime.

To sum up, I wrote on Twitter (@RossWynne) yesterday:

VCHS is a means to an end, frankly it’s JUST compute. It’s what you do with it that matters 😉

VCHS adds the flexibility of deployment of IaaS components so you can just get on with the job in hand… Running your applications, it just happens to be in the Cloud!