For those who have used the NSX vSphere REST API, you will know that with every API call you are required to send the following in the headers: Content-Type application/xml Basic <base64 encoded credentials> So if you have an OSX machine, you can leverage openssl (which is installed by default) to generate the base64 encoded credentials. This means you do not have to find a website and paste credentials into the site to generate the encoded credentials. ...
Changing NSX-v controller passwords is a question which comes up quite a bit with customers. Often because the passwords chosen at deployment time are either too complex to type in on a VM console session, or on the other end of the spectrum, they were set to something easy to type during deployment, and now need to be changed. When deploying NSX-v controllers during the setup phase, the password is set when deploying the first controller. ...
One of the features of NSX-v is the ability to create a Layer 2 VPN between 2 NSX-v Edge Services Gateways (ESG from now on). But what happens if there is no NSX-v at the destination where you would like to extend your Layer 2 network. As of NSX-v 6.1.0 the concept of a Standalone Edge L2 VPN Client has been made available to deploy into a remote vSphere environment. ...
Whilst working with a customer recently, we encountered a situation recently where we were required to run a packet capture on a VCSA (vCenter Server appliance) version 6.0. Being a Linux appliance underneath, the tool to use is tcpdump, but by default tcpdump is not actually installed by default. There are a few steps you need to follow to get it installed. SSH into the VCSA which should get you to the standard appliance shell ...
On various engagements I am involved with, I often need to produce some code to add or delete objects from NSX-v. These objects in general are things like IP Sets, MAC Sets, Security Groups, Security Tags, Services, Service Groups, Security Policies and even deleting the FW rulebase itself. Until recently I was doing this manually as I was dealing with relatively small numbers of objects, however on a previous engagement I was working on a script to import up to 33,000 objects and when testing the script in a dev environment, we needed a way to go through and delete everything we had just imported and set it back to “defaults”. ...
Recently on a customer site we had a peculiar scenario where we were deploying a VM into a NSX environment via vRA and the operation was failing due to an unknown reason. However, we noticed that the IP address that vRA had allocated for the new VM was still responding to our pings even though the provisioning process had failed and the VM was never actually deployed…… so what was responding to our pings and where was it???? ...
Its well documented that the only way to configure syslog settings on NSX-v controllers is via the REST API. One of the things I find myself constantly doing over and over again on customer engagements is configuring syslog servers details on the NSX-v controllers, whether its because I am at a new client, or someone decides to change the destination for their syslog and we need to update them all. ...
The Broadcom bnx2x NIC driver for VMware ESXi when installed on a ESXi 5.5 host is often an overlooked component when working with VMware NSX. If you have one of the Broadcom NICs which supports VXLAN offload and uses the bnx2x driver, it is important to choose the correct driver version. Not all versions are created equal! If you look through the release notes provided with all versions of the bnx2x driver download on the VMware website, it will show you a full history of changes and enhancements made to the driver. ...
Often when working in customer environments, there is a requirement to define security group members which are not virtual machines within the visualised environment. To achieve this, these security group members must be defined as an IP Set. The IP Set can then be included as an object in a security group. However, within the UI, it doesn’t show you all the non-vm members of a security group. ...
Whilst working on a vCloud Automation Center integration with NSX-v this evening, I noticed a strange error which had appeared in the logs in regards to the data collection for Network and Security Inventory. The Network and Security Inventory data collection was displaying the time the data collection last completed, which looked fine to me, as it was inline with what I was expecting, but the status was showing as Failed. ...