New VMware NSX Licensing Scheme is released

Hi all,

VMware just announced the new NSX Licensing scheme so please read the FAQ here which has all the preliminary information without even getting panicked and also get in touch with your sales person (assigned to your account) which will give you the better idea.

So by looking at this the most suitable one for any small to mid size organization is the "Advanced" version which has mostly all the bells and whistles except the multi site and Cross VC functionalities.

Its a simple math when making the decisions on what the organization wants. If its ready to spend money to connect their geographically dispersed locations then Enterprise edition is the only choice.

To promote open stack the standard Edition is having the support for it. Home Lab people might have to go for the Standard Edition depending on the price of it as I'm sure it wont be affordable to choose the Advanced or Enterprise version.

IPSEC and SSL VPN  are part of Enterprise which is rising a question on just using L2VPN when normal organization have staff people who are connecting remotely using their MAC/WIN/*NIX machines. So even for that feature they need to go for Enterprise version. Hoping that this should be part of Advanced and NOT Enterprise but lets see what the future might hold.

All the remote features are part of Enterprise which is nice as if you don't need it you don't buy them.

There is no indication on pricing done as the pointer was set to contact the Sales person but even a hint should be fine on the pricing model or even if one has to use just one feature from other edition then what is the cost involved in that (rather than switching from one edition to another completely).

Home Lab people will surely need most of the features to test and try out various scenarios but not sure what will happen in that area unless the person is a vExpert, then its a different story.

This granular model looks adaptive but the pricing model will tell us more on how people feel about it. I just heard that it will be based on 1K per socket but I would not go with it unless it come from a valid source or from VMware itself. So hoping something should be publicly available which will give an idea to the large audience.

Share and care !

Thanks for your time.

vRA Blueprint and Ubuntu 14.04 with Open VM Tools customizaton

If you are using Ubuntu 64 bit 14.04 version with Open VM Tools installed then you can read further on how to use the Open VM Tools and then use it with vRA.

Ubuntu 14.04 VM w Open VMware Tools

The version of Open VM Tools its running is - 2:9.4.0-1280544-5ubuntu6.2. You can get the version details by using the following command

dpkg –l | grep open-vm-tools

You can install the open vm tools by giving the command:

apt-get install open-vm-tools

If the tools service is stopped or not running then you can run the following command:

service open-vm-tools start

If you encounter any issue then only try with the following command:

/etc/init.d/open-vm-tools start

Additionally when customizing the VM and deploy a VM from the template we required an additional package installed as per the http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2075048 .

To install this plug-in in Ubuntu: 

To obtain and import the VMware Packaging Public Keys:

Create a directory on the virtual machine to store the VMware Packaging Public Keys.  

Download all the VMware Public Packaging Public Key files from the http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys directory.

Save the files to the directory you created.

For each key that you download, run this command to import the key:

sudo apt-key add /key_path/key_name

where:

key_path is the directory in which you saved the keys.

key_name is the file name of a key

Create the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vmware-tools.list with this content:

deb http://packages.vmware.com/packages/ubuntu precise main

or run this:

sudo echo "deb http://packages.vmware.com/packages/ubuntu precise main" >>  /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vmware-tools.list

Note: Use either precise or trusty above.

To install the package, run this command:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-deploypkg

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)

mI0ESAP+VwEEAMZylR8dOijUPNn3He3GdgM/kOXEhn3uQl+sRMNJUDm1qebi2D5b

Qa7GNBIlXm3DEMAS+ZlkiFQ4WnhUq5awEXU7MGcWCEGfums5FckV2tysSfn7HeWd

9mkEnsY2CUZF54lyKfY0f+vdFd6QdYo6b+YxGnLyiunEYHXSEo1TNj1vABEBAAG0

QlZNd2FyZSwgSW5jLiAtLSBMaW51eCBQYWNrYWdpbmcgS2V5IC0tIDxsaW51eC1w

YWNrYWdlc0B2bXdhcmUuY29tPoi8BBMBAgAmBQJIA/5XAhsDBQkRcu4ZBgsJCAcD

AgQVAggDBBYCAwECHgECF4AACgkQwLXgq2b9SUkw0AP/UlmWQIjMNcYfTKCOOyFx

Csl3bY5OZ6HZs4qCRvzESVTyKs0YN1gX5YDDRmE5EbaqSO7OLriA7p81CYhstYID

GjVTBqH/zJz/DGKQUv0A7qGvnX4MDt/cvvgEXjGpeRx42le/mkPsHdwbG/8jKveY

S/eu0g9IenS49i0hcOnjShGIRgQQEQIABgUCSAQWfAAKCRD1ZoIQEyn810LTAJ9k

IOziCqa/awfBvlLq4eRgN/NnkwCeJLOuL6eAueYjaODTcFEGKUXlgM4=

=bXtp

-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Once installed you can reboot the VM, convert the VM back to Template by right clicking the VM and selecting an option "Convert to Template".  Now access the UI of vRA and go to Infrastructure Tab. Select the Compute Resources option and highlight the necessary Cluster which has the Ubuntu blueprint listed, and select Data Collection option at the bottom of the selection, and for the Inventory option, select "Request Now". Once you see "Succeeded" then the vRA blueprint got updated and now the customization should work for the Ubuntu Linux 14.04 version.

Please refer KB 2075048 for instructions on other Linux distros.

Please share and care !!

Thanks for reading.