1. Learning NSX-T: Introduction

VMware NSX is one of the most sensational product that VMware produced 5 years back post Niciria acquisition and over the years this product has just gone better and better. NSX revolutionized the SDDC by adding the SDN capabilities and they way how SDN was used before NSX.

One of the major limitation of NSX-V was that it can be used only with vSphere and not with other platforms and customers were continuously demanding for a version of NSX that can be integrated with non-vSphere platforms.

To overcome this challenge, VMware came up with NSX-T which is version of NSX for non-vSphere based infrastructure. This version of NSX can be integrated with other hypervisiors such as KVM and application frameworks such as Redhat Openshift, Docker/Containers and Pivotal. In addition to these platforms, you can integrate your vSphere platform as well with NSX-T.

As we know that in NSX-V, vCenter was centralized management plane but NSX-T has its own management interface. As of now NSX-T doesn’t offer the same full feature set as NSX-V but VMware is continuously making enhancements to this product to make it more robust.

NSX-T when initially released was offering features such as logical routing, logical switching, micro-segmentation for VMs and a distributed firewall. But with the latest release of NSX-T, VMware added network virtualization and micro-segmentation for containers.

The latest version of NSX-T is 2.2.0 and to know more about the capabilities offered by this version, please see https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX-T-Data-Center/2.2/rn/VMware-NSX-T-22-Release-Notes.html

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UEFI Secure Boot with ESXi 6.5

UEFI Secure Boot: UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is a replacement for the traditional BIOS firmware. In UEFI, Secure Boot is a “protocol” of the UEFI firmware. UEFI Secure boot ensures that the boot loaders are not compromised by validating their digital signature against a digital certificate in the firmware. UEFI can store whitelisted digital certificates in a signature database (DB). There is also a blacklist of forbidden certificates (DBX), a Key Exchange Keys (KEK) database and a platform key. These digital certificates are used by the UEFI firmware to validate the boot loader. Boot loaders are typically cryptographically signed and their digital signature chains to the certificate in the firmware.The default digital certificate in almost every implementation of UEFI firmware is a x509 Microsoft UEFI Public CA cert. Most of the UEFI implementations also allows the installation of additional certificate in the UEFI firmware and UE...

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