Entries from Eric Sloof

VMware Hyper-Converged Software transforms industry-standard x86 servers and directly attached storage into radically simple Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) to help eliminate high IT costs, management complexity, and performance limitations. VMware Hyper-Converged Software enables the lowest cost and highest performance HCI solutions available. The tightly integrated software stack includes VMware vSphere, the market-leading hypervisor; VMware Virtual SAN, radically simple, enterprise-class native storage; and VMware vCenter Server, a unified and extensible management solution.

Virtual SAN is natively integrated with vSphere and it is configured with just a few mouse clicks. Since disks internal to the vSphere hosts are used to create a Virtual SAN datastore, there is no dependency on external shared storage. Virtual machines can be assigned specific storage policies based on the needs of the applications. These workloads benefit from dependable shared storage with predictable performance and availability characteristics.

The new release of Virtual SAN, version 6.2, further reduces TCO by delivering up to 10x greater storage efficiency. Virtual SAN 6.2 is optimized for modern all-flash storage, delivering efficient near-line deduplication, compression, and erasure coding capabilities that enable high performance all-flash systems for as low as $1 per GB of usable capacity—up to 50% less than the cost of lower-performing hybrid solutions from the leading competition.

In this publication we will describe all the relevant procedures for Day 2 operations for Virtual SAN 6.2. We aim to update this material on an on-going basis, and we will incorporate any feedback and or requests we get as soon as possible. If you have any comments, feedback or simply have spotted a mistake or a type, make sure to click the grey "+" sign on the right side of the respective paragraph. We aim to make fixes within 48 hours.

For those who prefer reading this publication using an e-reader we have the following formats available:

PDF - Virtual SAN 6.2 Ops Guide
ePUB - Virtual SAN 6.2 Ops Guide
Mobi - Virtual SAN 6.2 Ops Guide

VMware Horizon Toolbox is a Web portal that acts as an extension to View Administrator in View virtual desktops in VMware Horizon 6. With the Horizon Toolbox, you can determine the correct system size and load for View Connection Server, locate each user’s login and logout times, and find out how many endpoints are using which clients, for example, iOS, Android, Windows, or OS X. Use the VMware Horizon Toolbox Web portal to address auditing and management assistance issues.



If you have VMware Horizon Enterprise Edition with VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon, you can already audit sessions and usage. If you have Horizon View Standard Edition or Horizon Advanced Edition (which do not contain vRealize Operations for Horizon), you can use the Horizon Toolbox to audit sessions and usage. Horizon Toolbox has some additional functionality that vRealize Operations for Horizon does not provide like:

• Client (device) auditing
• Snapshot auditing
• Remote assistance

This document describes the best practices for using vRealize Orchestrator and its design, development, and configuration functionality. The depth of coding design presented in this document is from a macro level, which ensures that the design fits well within the greater architecture of products used, down to the micro level that includes JavaScript coding guidelines to be used in vRealize Orchestrator.


A full life cycle of vRealize Orchestrator development involves a multi-phased approach that includes design, development, testing, and release best practices. A clean code development approach was applied to vRealize Orchestrator development.

This approach can be applied to any programming language or product to help create well-written code. Many of the base concepts that are discussed in the book Clean Code by Robert C. Martin are used in this document. It is recommended that you familiarize yourself with the content in that book. For more book recommendations, see Recommended Reading.

This document focuses on helping administrators to correctly design and size a Virtual SAN 6.2 cluster, and answer some of the common questions around number of hosts, number of flash devices, number of magnetic disks, and detailed configuration questions to help to correctly and successfully deploy a Virtual SAN.

This is the first definitive reference for all network and data center virtualization professionals planning, implementing, or operating VMware NSX 6.2 for vSphere. It is the only NSX guide published by VMware, authored by VMware technical experts, and reflecting the experience of pioneering VMware NSX adopters representing a wide spectrum of environments, use cases, deployment sizes, and feature usage.

Drawing on 50+ years of network, data center, and virtualization experience, the authors offer deep practical insights for maximizing the reliability and value of VMware NSX and the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in any data center environment. You'll master VMware NSX through practical hands-on labs and detailed configuration examples. Coverage includes:

• How VMware vSphere® enables the agile, virtualized data center
• Establishing data center application and network topologies with VMware NSX
• Working with VMware NSX Manager, VMware NSX Controller, and clustering
• Defining logical switch networks with VXLAN
• Transforming routing architectures with the Distributed Logical Router (DLR)
• Implementing NSX edge routing and high availability
• Deploying each leading type of VPN with NSX Edge VPN services
• Balancing loads in your application topology
• Using additional NSX edge services, including Layer 2 bridging, NAT, and DHCP
• Securing your data center network with distributed firewalls
• Automating your security architecture for maximum efficiency
• Architecting, deploying, and migrating to Multi-vCenter NSX
• Monitoring, securing, and optimizing VMware NSX environments

VMware NSX 6.2 for vSphere Essentials pre-order now available

The VMware vCloud Air Network is an ecosystem of over 4,000 service providers located in more than 100 countries offering VMware based cloud services. Local providers ensure data sovereignty while providing a wide range of cloud services and vertical market expertise through specialized compliance and certifications.

vCloud Air Network providers are uniquely positioned to offer their services to the market and become a seamless extension of existing VMware enterprise customers’ on-premises data centers. Having the capability to move workloads in and out of the customers’ chosen cloud platform is a key factor for most enterprise customers in helping them maintain their existing investments with their on-premises applications, and to avoid lock-in to any one vendor or provider.


Disaster recovery and risk management is a key priority on all CIOs’ agendas for 2016, and being able to offer a disaster recovery service between their own data center and a vCloud Air Network provider offers economies of scale, lower capital cost, and a lower operational cost model for protecting business critical applications and investments.

This document explores a potential solution where the end customer and the vCloud Air Network provider have common components running in their data centers to achieve a unified hybrid cloud experience offering seamless workload mobility and disaster recovery services to the end customers. 

Use VMware Log Insight and NSX to determine applications flows on any application. Take the logs and provide Microsegmentation around the workload. Tier Security Groups to enforce and then use custom DFW tags to make these into visual charts. By Anthony Burke from VMware.

This document is targeted at networking and virtualization architects interested in deploying VMware NSX Network virtualization solution. VMware’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) vision leverages core data center virtualization technologies to transform data center economics and business agility through automation and non-disruptive deployment that embraces and extends existing compute, network and storage infrastructure investments. NSX is the component providing the networking virtualization pillar of this vision.

As a platform, NSX provides partners the capability of integrating their solution and build on the top of the existing functionalities. NSX enables an agile overlay infrastructure for Public and Private Cloud environments leveraging a resilient underlay infrastructure. In many data centers, some workloads have not been virtualized, or cannot be virtualized.


In order to integrate them into the SDDC architecture, NSX provides the capability of extending virtual networking to the physical one by the way of Layer 2 or Layer 3 gateways. This document will focus on the Layer 2 gateway feature, and how it can be achieved natively on a host running NSX, but also through a third party hardware device that can still be controlled by NSX.

This first part of this document presents a summary of the benefits of NSX and the use cases for a Layer 2 gateway service. The second part will focus on the technical overview of the solution and the configuration required on the NSX side for the integration of a third party hardware-based layer 2 gateway.

Fully updated for the newest versions of VMware Virtual SAN, this guide show how to scale VMware's fully distributed storage architecture to meet any enterprise storage requirement. World-class Virtual SAN experts Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping thoroughly explain how Virtual SAN integrates into vSphere 6.x and enables the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). You'll learn how to take full advantage of Virtual SAN, and get up-to-the-minute insider guidance for architecture, implementation, and management.

Writing for administrators, consultants, and architects, Hogan and Epping show how Virtual SAN implements both object-based storage and a policy platform that simplifies VM storage placement. You'll discover how the latest versions of Virtual SAN and vSphere combine to dramatically improve resiliency, scale-out storage functionality, and control over QoS. This edition's extensive new coverage includes:

• All new VMware Virtual SAN functionality and updates since the first edition
• An entirely new chapter on stretched clustering and ROBO configurations
• New discussions of the VM file format, de-deduplication, compression, checksums, encryption, and the Health UI
• Advanced techniques for delivering enterprise-grade storage capabilities with Virtual SAN

Both an up-to-the-minute reference and hands-on tutorial, Essential Virtual SAN, Second Edition uses realistic examples to demonstrate Virtual SAN's most powerful capabilities. You'll learn how to plan, architect, and deploy Virtual SAN successfully, avoid gotchas, troubleshoot problems, and make the most of virtualized storage as you move towards the Software Defined Data Center.

Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN): Administrator’s Guide to VMware Virtual SAN, Second Edition

VMware Virtual SAN is a distributed object storage platform that depends on IP Network connectivity to provide access to storage resources and storage management infrastructure services. Virtual SAN requires that all of the participating hosts can communicate over an IP network and are members of the same vSphere Cluster.

The locally attached storage devices from all of the hosts are pooled and presented as a single datastore to all members of the cluster once they have established IP connectivity and can communicate on the same Ethernet Layer 2 domain.

Virtual SAN clusters can also be formed with hosts that are connected to different Layer 3 network segments. The network Layer 3 segments must first be configured with IP Multicast in order to make all segments reachable by all the members of the cluster. Although the Virtual SAN network traffic and Virtual Machine traffic can coexist on the same networks, this paper will not cover the configuration semantics and tuning of Virtual Machine network traffic.

The focus of this paper is based on the physical network and vSphere related technologies that are required to deploy Virtual SAN across Layer 2 and Layer 3 topologies. This paper will help virtualization, network, and storage implementation engineers, administrators, and architects interested in deploying Virtual SAN on Layer 2 and across Layer 3 network topologies