manager

VMware NSX-T: Deploying the NSX-T 2.4.1 Manager Appliance

In this blog post, I am going to go through the steps that it takes in order to deploy the NSX Manager for NSX-T Data Center. To start things off, let’s get an overview of the NSX Manager.

What is the NSX Manager?

The NSX Manager is a standalone appliance that hosts the API services, the management plane, control plane, and policy management. As a result of this combined format, you no longer need to install the manager and controllers as separate VMs. The NSX Manager has three built in roles: policy, manager, and controller. The management plane includes the policy and manager roles. The central control plane includes the controller role. The NSX Manager also provides a GUI that is used for creating, configuring, and monitoring NSX components such logical switches, logical routers, and firewalls.

Deployment

To begin our deployment, log in to your vCenter. Find the cluster/host that you want to deploy the NSX Manager on and right click it and select Deploy OVF Template.

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Upgrade vRealize Operations Manager to 6.6

vrops icon

Over the past month or so, I’ve been dabbling with vROPs 6. In the midst of my dabbling…VMware released a upgrade to the product that came packed with a bunch of new features. Just to mention some:

Simplified usability and faster time to value capabilities:

  • New HTML5 user interface provides an easier and consistent experience.
  • The Getting Started dashboard allows for quick navigation.
  • Persona based dashboards provides for answers in one place. Dashboards are separated into categories such as Operations, Capacity and Utilization, Performance Troubleshooting, Workload Balance, and Configuration and Compliance.
  • Out of the box integration with vSAN and vRealize Automation provides quick time to value.

Fully Automated Workload Balancing:

  • Ensures performance across the datacenter’s with fully automated workload balancing, across clusters and across data stores.
  • Ensures DRS Configurations and provides the option to set DRS automation level for individual objects.
  • Predictive DRS takes action to preempt resource contention.
  • Utilizes operations analytics to optimize initial placement of workloads through vRealize Automation.

Naturally, after reading about these features…I wanted to try them first hand. So off to my lab I went to upgrade and give it a test drive. The upgrade process is simple, as I will outline in this post.

First, you will want to head over to VMware.com and download the upgrade appliance.

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Deploying NSX Manager 6.3

VMwareNSX

In this blog post we will be deploying the NSX manager appliance. This is the first step in beginning to deploy NSX in your VMware environment. First things first, after downloading the NSX OVA file, right click on the cluster you want to deploy the appliance in and click Deploy OVF Template. Browse to and select the NSX OVA file and click Next.

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