NSX-V vs NSX-T – Basic Comparison

 

NSX-V	NSX-T
Tight integration with vSphere	Yes	No
Works without vCenter	No	Yes
Support for multiple vCenter instances	No	Yes
Supported virtualization platforms	VMware vSphere	VMware vSphere, KVM, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenStack, AWS native workloads
NSX Edge deployment	ESXi VM	VM or physical server
Overlay encapsulation protocols	VXLAN	GENEVE
Virtual switches (N-VDS)	vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS)	Open vSwitch or VDS
Logical switch replication modes	Unicast, Multicast, Hybrid	Unicast (Two-tier or Head)
ARP suppression	Yes	Yes
A two-tier distributed routing	No	Yes
Configuring the IP addressing scheme for network segments	Manual	Automatic (between Tier 0 and Tier 1)
Integration for traffic inspection	Yes	No
Kernel-level distributed firewall	Yes	Yes

vRealize Automation 8.5

 VMware recently announced general availability of vRealize Automation 8.5. 

Generally speaking, vRealize Automation 8.5 adds capabilities focusing on the areas of multi-cloud support with Azure, extensibility with vRealize Orchestrator and ABX as well as expansion of network automation capabilities with vSphere and NSX.

What’s new in vRealize Automation 8.5

• Project Administrator can act as Approver for all approval requests – When creating an approval policy, administrators can select a Project Administrator (for the project in which the approval was triggered) as the approver.
• Configure when IP address from IPAM is released – You can configure how long it takes for an IP address to be released from allocation once it is no longer used. This allows for faster provisioning of new workloads where IP addresses are scarce.
• Limit the number of namespaces for a project on a Kubernetes zone – The maximum number of supervisor namespaces that can be deployed for the project on a given K8s zone now has a configurable limit.
• VMware vRealize Orchestrator plug-in for vRealize Automation 8.5 – The updated vRealize Automation plug-in supports scripting objects generation such as cloud accounts, cloud zones, projects, tags, and CRUD operations to build your own content.
• Enable resources across Azure regions to be added to the same resource group – An Azure resource group is created in an Azure region. However, resources from any Azure region can be added into it. This feature enables admins to add resources from other regions into the Azure RG.
• Snapshot management for Azure disks – You can now pass the resource group name, encryption set, and network policy while creating the disk snapshot.
• Ability to enable/disable boot diagnostics for Azure VMs – You can enable/disable boot diagnostics for Azure VMs as a day 2 action.
• Support for NSX-V to NSX-T migration with vSphere 6.7 – vRealize Automation NSX-V to NSX-T migration now supports migrating deployments that are running on vSphere 6.7.
• Support for existing global security group as part of NSX-T Federation – vRealize Automation can now discover global security groups configured under NSX-T global manager. These groups can be leveraged in network profiles and VMware Cloud Templates to build deployments.
• Custom Roles API – The APIs for Custom Roles (RBAC) are now available (Create, Read, List, Update, Delete).
• Notifications – The Service Broker administrator can view the list of available email notification scenarios and enable or disable them for all users in their organization.
• Terraform runtime environment authentication – This release introduces authentication for adding Terraform service runtime version to vRA for more secure environments.

List of VMDKs in vCenter Server 7.0 Appliance

 

In vCenter Server Appliance 7.0, there are 16 VMDKs now. In  vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 version it was 13 disks. Additional 3 new disks in this release are as follow:

 

·         vTSDB Service Repository for stats

·         vTSDB Service Repository for logs

·         Lifecycle for binaries (install, update and upgrade). 

There are multiple ways in which we can access information about disks. Below are some of the examples. 

·         We can check usage from vimtop about disks, however vimtop does not show all disks.

·         Complete list of disks can be seen in Appliance VM edit settings as well.

·         You can check these disks from VAMI as shown in below screenshot.

·         We can use df -h command to retrieve disk information as shown below.

·         Another way to access this information is lsblk command on vCenter shell as shown below.

Below is the complete list of VMDKs along with their usages and mount points.

Note: 

Below sizes are application only for vCenter Server Appliance 7.0 with tiny specification and default size and hence will differ in your environment as per inventory specification.

·         VMDK1

·         Size:

·         12 GB

·         Mount Points:

·         / (10GB)

·         /boot (132MB)

·         SWAP (1GB)

·         Usage:

·         Directory where the kernel images and boot loader configurations are stored.

·         VMDK2

·         Size:

·         1.8 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /tmp

·         Usage:

·         Directory used to store temporary files generated or used by services from vCenter Server

·         VMDK3

·         Size:

·         25 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         SWAP

·         Usage:

·         Directory used when the system is out of memory to swap to disk

·         VMDK4

·         Size:

·         25 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/core

·         Usage:

·         Directory where core dumps from VPXD process from the vCenter Server are stored

·         VMDK5

·         Size:

·         10 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/log

·         Usage:

·         Directory where vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller store all logs for the environment

·         VMDK6

·         Size:

·         10 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/db

·         Usage: 

·         VMware Postgres database storage location

·         VMDK7

·         Size: 

·         5 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/dblog

·         Usage:

·         VMware Postgres database logging location

·         VMDK8

·         Size:

·         10 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/seat

·         Usage:

·         Stats, Events, Alarms and Tasks (SEAT) directory for VMware Postgres

·         VMDK9

·         Size:

·         1 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/netdump

·         Usage:

·         VMware Netdump collector repository that stores ESXi dumps

·         VMDK10

·         Size:

·         10 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/autodeploy

·         Usage: 

·         VMware Auto Deploy repository that stores the thinpackages used for stateless booting of ESXi hosts

·         VMDK11

·         Size:

·         10 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/imagebuilder

·         Usage:

·         VMware Image Builder repository that stores the vSphere image profiles, software depots and VIB packages, such as driver VIBs and update VIBs.

·         VMDK12

·         Size:

·         100 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/updatemgr

·         Usage:

·         VMware Update Manager repository where patches and updates are stored for Virtual Machine and ESXi hosts

·         VMDK13

·         Size:

·         50 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/archive

·         Usage:

·         VMware Postgres database’s Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) location

·         VMDK14

·         Size:

·         10 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/vtsdb

·         Usage:

·         VMware vTSDB Service Repository that stores the stats

·         VMDK15

·         Size:

·         5 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/vtsdblog

·         Usage:

·         VMware vTSDB Service Repository that stores the logs of the service

·         VMDK16

·         Size:

·         100 GB

·         Mount Point:

·         /storage/lifecycle

·         Usage: 

·         Workload Control Plane service stage directory or software depot, this stores the binaries for install and update/upgrade.