Categoriearchief: NSX

Replace Local Manager Certificate

imageA customer send out the request to take a look at a few alarms they received in the NSX Manager console. The alarm they received was about a expiring certificate for local manager.

We did some investigating from the NSX Manager and it was clear that this was a self-signed (not linked to the company own PKI infrastructure) and it was in use. This last comment means we have to use the Application Programing Interface (API) to tell NSX to use the new certificate.

Since this is a production environment we don’t do anything before we have verified that a recent backup of the NSX database is available. Please take note that a VMware snapshot is not supported the restore a NSX Manager Cluster. It is  best practice to have a scheduled NSX Manager backup schedule. Before we start working on the environment we create a manual backup of the NSX database.

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Unable to delete a segment in NSX because of an orphaned logical port

imageFor one of our customers all NSX related questions are routed to me (pun intended). I received a customer ticket stating that they where not able to remove an unused NSX created port group although it is not in use while observing from vCenter.

After some investigating within NSX it was clear that this issues was caused by an orphaned logical port. NSX allows you to do allot of the config from the UI, but for some actions it is required to turn to the application programming interface (API). NSX provides a programmatic API to automate management activities. The API follows a resource-oriented architecture by using JSON object encoding. Clients interact with the management plane by using RESTful web service calls over HTTPS.

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NSX Microsegmentation

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In this blog article I will first give you some history of the NSX product and how it evolved to the current product that we all know today. Next I will explain the security use case for NSX. And show you step by step how to implement this in your environment.

A bit of history
In 2012, VMware acquired a company called Nicira. One year later VMware launched of the first NSX product from to the public. One year later in 2013 VMware launched NSX for vSphere (NSX-V). NSX-V came with its limitations. To name a few It was tied into vCenter and it was not possible to create multi-tier routing. In 2016 came VMware launched NSX 1.0 which later evolved into NSX Datacenter. Now fast forward to January 22 of 2022, on this day VMware release NSX for Datacenter version 3.2.0.1. This release came with a long list of improvement on his predecessor. The migration and upgrade assistance is very much improved to allow this version to operate in a wide variation of environments. Another big change is the launch of the Kubernetes bases NSX Application Platform. Lees verder

DPU-based Acceleration for NSX 4.0

imageDPU-based Acceleration for NSX is a result of Project Monterey. VMware began with this project around two years ago. VMware will continue to offer support for hypervisor-based NSX architectures, but the capability of running NSX on a DPU or SmartNIC offers major advantages for customers that require accelerated network performance such as healthcare and financial services.

In this blog I will take you step by step to understand the magnitude of DBU-based Acceleration for NSX.

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vSphere vCenter and NSX-T, Portgroup and Segment inventory out of sync

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In a SDDC project the customer is requesting to rename the vLANS and vSphere vCenter Portgroups. Since the costomer is using NSX-T Datacenter the place to perform this rename is actions is the NSX-T Datacenter Manager console.  The location where you can find this information is under Network>Segments. Or via the API.

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NSX-T Data Center required network ports

nsxtIn this blog post I will sum up all the network ports that are required to operate various capabilities that are within NSX-T Data Center. This blog is about current version of NSX-T Data Center, the current version is 3.2.0.0.1. Please acknowledge that not all features are available under each NSX-T Data Center Edition.
Please verify which features are licensed for your deployment so you can check which features you can deploy under your license.

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NSX-T Manager SSH Root Access Denied

We want to logon to access the NSX-T as root via Putty, when we try to logon we are presented with a Access Denied error.

To resolve this issue we perform the following procedure:

Access the NSX-T manager console via vCenter and logon with your root credentials.

vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Press “I” to access INSERT Mode

Change PermitRootLogin to yes

Change StrictModes to no 

Press the ESC key to exit the INSERT Mode
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VMworld 2021 Top 10 session to watch

vmworld2021It is that time of the year again to start looking forward to VMworld 2021. Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic VMworld 2021 will again be “fully virtual” again.

The upside to a virtual event is that you don’t need to walk across a big conference complex to get from one session to another. You can follow the conference from the luxury of you own chair and desk. Poor your own drink of choice, sit back and relax and take in all the information on VMware latest and greatest from your own home. Because VMworld 2021 will be fully virtual, like last year that will make it easier for people to attend since you don’t need to arrange travel (flight/hotel) to attend VMworld.

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Fixing an interrupted NSX-T Manager upgrade

nsxtThe process for upgrading the NSX-T managers in an environment is a automated process that works through three managers and finishes the moment all the NSX-T managers are upgraded to the new desired version. Recently I was upgrading a NSX-T datacenter environment from version 3.1.0.0.017107177 to version 3.1.1.0.0.17483065 in my lab environment. The Edge nodes and Transport Nodes had already been upgraded successfully. While we where in the middle of upgrading the the NSX-T manager upgrade got interrupted and the NSX-T managers rebooted when the upgrade was not yet finished.
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Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion

vmware_vSphere7_graphicVMware released vSphere version 7.0 U1c – 17327586 in December 2020. Next to the cool new features that is included in this version (This blog is al about one of those cool features) another very important reason to download and install this version of vSphere is that it closes a major security issue with previous versions. You can find more info on this here.
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