Tag archieven: NSX

Understanding BGP Peering in NSX

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In this article, I will dive into the functionality of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) peering within a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and NSX environment. Since VMware’s acquisition of Broadcom, the company’s primary focus has shifted toward expanding and optimizing VCF, making it a critical area of development for enterprise customers.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work with large-scale clients who can fully leverage the benefits that VCF provides. This experience has not only broadened my technical expertise but also given me valuable insights into the real-world applications of VCF in enterprise environments. NSX has always been a key area of interest for me, and integrating it with VCF presented a new, exciting learning curve that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed navigating.

One of the critical aspects of delivering a successful VCF environment is ensuring seamless connectivity with the broader network infrastructure. This is where BGP comes into play. To ensure reliable and efficient routing in and out of VCF, BGP is an essential protocol that helps facilitate proper network communication and routing across complex environments. In the following sections, I will walk you through the importance of BGP peering in a VCF/NSX setup and how it enables smooth, scalable networking.

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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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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 NSX Microsegmentation

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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Setting up NSX Advanced Load Balancer for VMware Horizon

Back in June 2019 VMware published a press report on there intent to acquire AVI Networks. AVI Networks was a leader in the multi-cloud application delivery services. VMware has rebranded the load balancing product, it is now called NSX Advanced Load Balancer.

In this article I will describe how to install the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, and configure it for VMware Horizon.

This is the architecture we are going to build.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer
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