Entries from Eric Sloof

Technical Overview of the latest version of vSAN, including vSAN Max.

This document contains the latest updates, aligned to NSX version 4.1.

Some highlights include:

Technology overview chapters:

• TEP HA (Ch3)
• VPC/Projects (Ch2)
• A/A Stateful Gateways (Ch4)
• Bare Metal edge hardware recommendation (Ch8)
• DPUs (Ch9)
• Update VRF route leaking (Ch4)

Design Chapter (Ch7):

• Projects
• 1 VC to many NSX
• MTU recommendation, Gateway vs. global MTU

With vSphere 8 and NSX 4, VMware has introduced support for SmartNICs or Data Processing Units (DPUs). The DPU implementation in vSphere is called vSphere Distributed Service Engine.

DPUs (SmartNICs) are network cards with built-in intelligence that can perform various network functions directly on the adapter through their own programmable processors. In addition to the networking accelerators, DPUs like NVIDIA BlueField also have general-purpose Arm processor cores that can run a full ESXi general system.

With the DPU technology, NSX services like routing, switching, firewall and monitoring are offloaded to the DPU from the host hypervisor. With these capabilities, it is possible to improve performance, free up resources on the host and isolate workload and infrastructure domains.

White paper: Optimizing Networking and Security Performance Using VMware vSphere and NVIDIA BlueField DPU with BWI 

When I’m teaching a VMware training course, I often use Excalidraw as a tool for creating online whiteboard sessions. There was a good use case for this tool during the COVID-19 period, when most training courses were delivered online through Zoom or WebEX.

But nowadays, when I’m teaching a training course at an onsite training facility, I’m still using Excalidraw as my whiteboard tool, even when I can use a normal whiteboard with real markers instead.

Compared to a real physical whiteboard, Excalidraw still offers some great benefits; like drag-and-drop, elaborate and sharing the created whiteboard sessions. Those tasks can be performed much easier when working with a virtual whiteboard.

Recently Oliver Draggy introduced a new plug-in, especially targeted at VMware architecture icons. He did a great job creating whiteboard elements like networks, routers, databases, racks and much more. This plug-in is freely available, you can use it in Excalidraw with a simple click of a button.

I’ve created a short video to demo this plug-in within an Excalidraw whiteboard session.

Links:

Excalidraw

Oliver Draggy on LinkedIn

VMware architecture icons

Excalidraw Libraries