Introducing HashiCorp Terraform Provider for NSX-T Policy Manager and VMware Cloud on AWS

Last update on 12th January 2021: Added a comment about a new option “nsxt_policy_predefined_gateway_policy” that removes the requirement to run “terraform import”. Previous update on 2nd September 2020: Terraform NSX-T Policy provider is automatically downloaded when running “terraform init” (no need to compile it – read further below for more details). This blog post will […]

Introducing the HashiCorp Terraform Provider for VMware Cloud on AWS

Last updated on 2nd September 2020: Terraform VMC provider is automatically downloaded when running “terraform init” (no need to compile it – read further below for more details). Here is a feature I had been hoping to see for for a long time – a Terraform provider to spin up VMware Cloud on AWS resources. […]

Network and Security Updates in VMware Cloud on AWS version 1.9

With the recent VMware Cloud on AWS release 1.9 out comes a ton of new networking and security features. Most of the focus of these features is on making the platform easier to manage and secure VMs in the cloud. There are all summarized in this post, except the Terraform NSX-T Policy provider which will […]

Python Tips – Parsing, Dictionaries and APIs

This post will go through various Python tips on topics such as: Parsing Python strings Extracting entries from Python dictionaries and list Making API requests from Python In a previous post, I wrote a AWS Lambda function in Python that synchronized vSphere tags with NSX Security tags. The main coding challenges were from extracting some […]

AWS CLI – back to basics

I have been setting up Terraform with S3 as back-end and one of the blog posts I was consulting suggested using AWS CLI which I hadn’t been using for a couple of years. So… time to go back to basics! What is the AWS CLI ? The AWS Command Line Interface is “a unified tool […]

Synchronizing NSX security tags with vSphere tags using AWS Lambda

This post will walk-through how to synchronize VMware vSphere Tags with NSX security tags via vRealize Log Insight Cloud and AWS Lambda Python scripts. Thanks to William Lam, Gilles Chekroun and Guillaume Vibert for their help with this project. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career is to listen to customers. It’s too […]

AWS Transit VPC (Part 2) – with Palo Alto Networks and VMware Cloud on AWS

This technical post will walk through how to set up a Transit VPC with Palo Alto Networks firewalls and how to connect it to VMware Cloud on AWS. The instructions below will also be applicable to a standard AWS VPC. You can also use the commands further below to set up a route-based VPN from […]

VMware Cloud Marketplace, Bitnami and VMware Cloud on AWS

This post will walk through the VMware Cloud Marketplace, Bitnami and VMware Cloud on AWS. One of the most underrated aspects of the success of AWS EC2 is the ease at which customers can deploy 3rd party software onto their platform via the AWS Marketplace. Based on the latest data I’ve come across, the AWS […]

AWS Client VPN Tutorial

This post will provide a tutorial of how to set up AWS Client VPN. AWS Client VPN is a fairly recent AWS service and something I had been meaning to try out for a while. Several customers and colleagues recently asked me about whether it could be used with VMware Cloud on AWS so I […]

VMware acquisitions

Post last updated on 3rd September 2019 Here is my brief history of recent VMware acquisitions – what they are, how they fit with our overall strategy, what they replaced or super-seeded and what they are now called. As everything else on this blog, all the views expressed here are mine and not my employer’s. […]