Goodbye VMware, Hello HashiCorp!

This is long overdue but in case you missed my announcements on LinkedIn and Twitter, I left VMware early August after a great 5.5 years there. This tweet thread should tell you how much I enjoyed my time and how much I value the things I learned and the people I met while at VMware. […]

Terraform Workspaces

In recent customer conversations, I’ve noticed that Terraform is being used not only more often but also by more teams within an organization. The teams could be: Network Compute Cloud Internet Security Firewall IP Address and DNS Management etc… Obviously, in smaller organizations, all these responsibilities might be within one or two teams but in […]

NSX Advanced Firewall As Code with Terraform

Update 16th July: I have published this sample configuration as a Module here. A recent update to the Terraform provider for NSX-T has provided operators the ability to deploy next-generation firewalling policies and rules. I covered how to use the provider in previous posts but I stuck to the simple features we supported at the […]

Fling Update: EasyAvi v2.0

Since we launched our EasyAvi Fling (formally known as Easy Deploy for NSX Advanced Load Balancing), we’ve had a lot of feedback from external and internal users. Most of the feedback was very positive on the tool but some users also ran into a number of minor bugs or missing features. The workflow could also […]

Terraform NSX-T in VMC – NSX Manager Private IP support

I recently had a requirement where a customer needed to access the VMware Cloud on AWS NSX-T manager directly. By default, any APIs calls relating to Network and Security on VMC on AWS have to be targeted to the NSX-T Reverse Proxy and not directly to the NSX-T platform. The Reverse Proxy is public-facing and […]

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery – Walkthrough and Integration with the SDDC Import/Export Fling

Disaster Recovery is a topic that comes up in most of my interactions with customers. In my 3+ years in the VMware Cloud team, my general observations are: Some customers’ DR strategy is limited to copying data to offsite tapes… but most large enterprise customers I talk to have a secondary or tertiary site they […]

Extending Terraform – A Deep Dive

As I was becoming familiar with Terraform and all the clouds it could automate, I started to realize there were things it couldn’t interact with. Even within VMware, while we have a number of providers for services and products like NSX-T, vSphere, VMware Cloud, vCloud Director or vRealize Automation, there are still many products that […]

New Fling: Easy Deploy for NSX Load Balancing a.k.a EasyAvi

When customers start using cloud infrastructure, there are five key networking components they want to replicate within their virtual cloud environment: Router Switch Firewall VPN Load-Balancer Out-of-the-box, VMware Cloud on AWS gives you the first four components but the Load-Balancing was somehow lacking. Yes, we could use virtual appliances from vendors like F5. Yes, we […]

Mini-post: Dev_overrides Terraform Block

I have blogged in the past about the various options you can use a ‘custom’ Terraform provider – that is to say, a private or experimental provider not hosted on the Terraform Registry. There are many ways to achieve this but in the latest 0.14 Terraform version, there is a great option that makes it […]

Fixed Network Segment vs Flexible Network Segment in NSX-T

This post will cover some caveats with regards to NSX-T segments and APIs. I will focus on VMware Cloud on AWS and Terraform but many of the comments will also apply to standard NSX-T. Let’s go through a concrete example. Creating a Network Segment with Terraform Most of the Terraform for NSX-T examples I have […]