vSphere+ – Installation and First Impressions

Reading Time 4 Minutes

Everyone has been talking about vSphere+ for a few weeks now, so I wanted to get a (technical) impression of what’s behind all the marketing-heavy blog articles and announcements.

A short diagram in advance so that it is clear what we are dealing with:

Traditional vSphere Environment converted to vSphere+ Subscription, graphic courtesy of VMware

In a classic vSphere environment, there are one to many vCenters that need to be managed. With vSphere+, a vCenter Cloud Gateway is introduced which acts as a relay between the VMware Cloud and the on-premises vCenters. This allows services from the VMware Cloud to be used with the on-premises datacenter. Sounds pretty easy!

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VMware NSX ALB / AVI Certificate Signing Request (CSR) with Microsoft CA

Reading Time 2 Minutes

Since I was dealing with VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (or NSX ALB aka AVI Loadbalancer, take your pick!) in connection with vSphere with Tanzu in our ITQ Lab environment, I also wanted to make it trustworthy with an “official” certificate and replace the “Self Signed Certificate”.

In the Lab environment, a Windows Certificate Authority (CA) and the CA Web Enrollment already exist on a Windows 2019 VM. I will not go into detail about the installation of the CA; here I followed an article on the VirtuallyThere Blog.

In addition, I have created a Certificate Template according to VMware specifications. In the future, I would like to use this for all VMware product deployments in the lab. I have written another blog article about this (Creating a Microsoft CA Template for vSphere 6.x/7.x), or if you want to read it directly from VMware, here is the KB article: Creating a Microsoft Certificate Authority Template for SSL certificate creation in vSphere 6.x/7.x

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Creating a Microsoft CA Template for vSphere 6.x/7.x

Reading Time 2 Minutes

In order to be able to create uniform certificates that are signed by a Microsoft CA in our lab environment in a meaningful and “VMware compliant” way, it was necessary to create a Certificate Template in advance.

The following instructions are based on the VMware KB article Creating a Microsoft Certificate Authority Template for SSL certificate creation in vSphere 6.x/7.x

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