VMware Professional Services

By Ben Bowman, Senior Technical Account Specialist (TAS) specializing in VMware NSX

As a Senior NSX TAS, over the years I’ve seen a lot of NSX-based private cloud implementations. With that experience in mind, I’d like to share some tips for making  your NSX implementations as effective as possible. This blog provides an  overview; see the Top Tips link below for more detail.

Start with People

The main point here is to establish a dedicated cloud team.  Creating a dedicated, cross-disciplinary cloud  team lets you:

• Sustain cloud effectiveness
• Reduce the time to market of new services
• Authoritatively pitch your private cloud to internal  customers

Other  People points include building T-shaped expertise, adopting a mindset of “Embrace Different”, and start building skillsets about microservices and containers.

Plan for Deployment of a Software-Defined Network

There are three key points here:

• Start segmentation with one application
• Build networks per application
• Check and recheck infrastructure connectivity

Again, see link below for more detail on these points.

Tidy Up Your Operations

Here, the key points are:

• Make sure someone has access to everything.  Things are different with a private cloud, where infrastructure elements routinely cross multiple towers.
• Check firmware and drivers at the host level. VMware technology is hardware agnostic. But, it’s important that each piece of hardware have the latest  firmware and drivers in place.  Discrepancies can  creep when you least expect it.
• Get your logs right.  Know where the log messages are going.  Grant access or replicate them on accessible servers.  They’re essential for troubleshooting, so everybody needs to see them.

The  devil is in the details when it comes to NSX success.  Train your people, cover your deployment bases,  and mind your operational P’s and Q’s.

Download TOP-TEN-TIPS-NSX-SUCCESS and let us know if you would like more information about how the NSX Technical Account Specialist (NSX TAS) service can be of assistance.

Ben is an experienced NSX and private cloud specialist, having spent over 15 years working with several companies in the data networking industry,  As an NSX Technical Account Specialist (TAS) at VMware, Ben has collaborated on deploying multiple software-defined data centers at Fortune 100 companies across several industries. Prior to joining VMware, Ben  was the Director of Network Engineering and Security for an enterprise  retail organization.