I am aware that that’s not a catchy blog post title. In fact, it doesn’t even really describe the problem or solution very well - for that I need to go into a little bit more depth! Suppose I have configured a Reservation with two Networks ticked (“192.168.1.0-VLAN1” and “192.168.10.0-VLAN10”). As you can see in the screenshot below, each of the networks has a Network Profile created and assigned with a network pool to provide IP addressing for the VMs.

*This post was meant to be published on Friday, VMworld Sleep Deprivation meant I didn’t click the button!* This is the last post and a bit of a wrap up on my VMworld 2014 series! There isn’t a keynote on day three, and there’s definitely a “winding down” feel as people tend to arrive later (if at all) and many are…feeling the effects of the previous night shall we say!

Day two of VMworld kicked off with a keynote session which traditionally includes demos of all that’s new. It was a well presented session with a glimpse into the sysadmin’s future with a demo of vCOps alerts popping up on Google glass. Since the sessions are available online I won’t go into detail, but it was worth a watch (if you didn’t watch the US one). My morning consisted of preparations for the VCP NV (NSX) exam, which I detailed in a previous post.

It is with great relief that I can announce I have passed my VCP NV (Network Virtualisation) having been caught out by the difficulty of the exam and failing previously. Exam Preparation I was fortunate to attend a VMware internal bootcamp (roughly equivalent to the ICM course) for NSX and have had experience deploying production NSX environments, so that is by far the best preparation. As always, the exam blueprint is crucial, you *have* to know all areas covered there.

After a bit of a rocky start (missed my flight and the partner day due to tendonitis in my knee) I arrived in Barcelona for my 2nd VMworld Europe. I headed straight from the airport to the PernixData party and caught up with the rest of the Xtravirt guys. Tuesday morning started as ever with a keynote address. It was a little disappointing, but not unexpected, that there were no real announcements or reveals in the keynote.

With the release of vCAC 6.1 there have been some great improvements in the setup of the clustered vCAC appliances - none of the previous copying of configuration files between appliances - just a simple wizard to do it all for you. In my opinion this is superb. You’ll need to have deployed a load balancer of some sort - vCAC 6.0 build-out to distributed model – Part 3.1: Configure Load Balancing with vCNS or vCAC 6.

SSO is a fundamental requirement when deploying vCAC, whether for a distributed or simple installation. This walk through goes through the deployment and configuration of the vCAC Identity Appliance, which provides a stand alone SSO instance for vCAC. Some of the posts in this series are completed with vCAC 6.0.1, others will be with 6.1. Where there are differences I will aim to point them out! Deploying the OVF Deploying the OVF is very simple, just run through the wizard:

The NSX Edge Gateway comes pre-armed with the ability to provide an SSL VPN for remote access into your network. This isn’t a new feature (SSL VPN was available in vCloud Networking and Security), but it’s worth a run through. I’m configuring remote access to my Lab, since it’s often useful to access it when on a client site, but traditional VPN connections are often blocked on corporate networks where HTTPS isn’t.

So recently I came across an error in the vSphere windows “fat client” when trying to use the search field. So a quick look at the VMware knowledge base brought up the following article http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2063020 So I went ahead and followed the KB artricle and then tried to search again.. the following error was generated. Also while logging into the vSphere web client the following error appears. I had access to the SSO components etc.

Quick post to cover a fix for installing the VNXe SRA when you encounter the below error: Failed to load SRA from ‘C:/Program Files/VMware/VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager/storage/sra/EMC VNXe SRA’. SRA command ‘queryInfo’ didn’t return a response. The components installed (in this order) are: vSphere 5.5 SRM 5.5 UNISphere CLI 1.5.4.1.0027-1 VNXe SRA 5.0.0 The root cause is that the system locale is EN-GB rather than EN-US, however even changing the locale does not resolve the issue.