Intro Making a career change has given me time to reflect on the last 3–4 years I’ve spent working with HCX. This tool isn’t just useful, it’s the backbone of what AVS has become. Without HCX, Azure VMware Solution would be a far tougher sell because migrations would be a nightmare for the average customer. […]

Navigating Broadcom
Intro Now that my wardrobe is starting to look less ‘corporate drone’ and more ‘traffic cone enthusiast’ thanks to my recent move to Pure Storage, I’ve found myself forming a more holistic opinion about my former employer, Broadcom. If you’re expecting a fiery exposé from a disgruntled insider, I’m going to have to disappoint you. […]

HCX Network Planning
Intro In my previous role as an AVS CSA, I collaborated with hundreds of customers to plan their HCX installations. Building on my previous post that explored the intricacies of an HCX Service Mesh and its various configurations, this blog post will take a more focused approach. We’ll surgically examine how to determine the necessary […]

Version 1.0 AVS Sizer!
I started thinking about how I could use this blog to make a sizer based on my previous AVS storage sizing post. Of course, as a reminder this is not an official sizer, but I understand that many in the partner and customer community don’t have any access to this basic need. So here we […]

Sizing Azure VMware Solution Cluster Storage Capacity
Most people who know me are aware that my primary background in the tech field is storage. When I joined the vSAN team at VMware in 2017, it was during a period of rapid “hockey stick” growth, making it an incredibly exciting time. Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) was expanding fast, and there was never a dull […]
Meet One of the Dragons in Your Datacenter: MTU
I thought it was important to make a quick post about MTU settings as it pertains to HCX. MTU has been a dragon that I have been fighting my entire career. Previously, it had been in Storage Area Networks. But even more recently it is been spitting fire in my current role. While I’m not […]
HCX Service Mesh Deep Dive
This topic has been rattling around in my brain for a LONG time. A HCX Service Mesh one of the toughest subjects that I struggled with when I started as a Cloud Solutions Architect for the Azure VMware Solution. An HCX Service Mesh is a critical component in HCX setup process. It facilitates the creation […]
Campfire Stories Series: HCX Internal FW Troubleshooting
As a Cloud Solutions Architect covering the Azure VMware Solution (AVS), I help many customers get their pilot kick-started. Typically this includes helping customers get their prerequisites done for the AVS service, deploying and connecting AVS, deploying and connecting Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), and doing a test migration using HCX. Having done a number of […]
Using the Identity Distributed Firewall in Azure VMware Solution
Recently, I received a request from a customer to use a feature I had not used previously. The client was currently using the Identity Firewall within NSX-t on-prem to protect users from accessing specific sites within their network. Since Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is a managed service, a few features that work with NSX are […]
First YouTube Video Launched!
My peers on the Azure VMware Solution team have been hard at work recording content for a new YouTube channel we just launched. The idea is to help people with simple and short how-to videos for the AVS solution. There is a lot of fantastic content out there, however, oftentimes its for on-prem only or […]