So following on from my previous post (NSX-v: ESG Packet Capture), today we run through how to do a packet capture on one of your NSX Controllers. Why would you want to do this I hear you ask? Well I had a situation recently where I had some unexplained behavior and I needed to make sure that a particular packet was physically arriving at the controller as it had to pass through several VRFs and a FW or two. ...

Whilst troubleshooting at a client today, I needed to perform a packet capture on one of the Edge Services Gateways in the environment. Performing a packet capture is often very helpful in diagnosing a range of different issues. To kick off a packet capture you can jump on the console of the ESG or like I am doing in this example, open up an SSH session to the ESG. You will need to know what interface to run the capture on, so run the following command to list out all the interfaces (for ease of reading I have removed all the interfaces that were showing down/down from the output) ...

So you’ve just installed NSX Manager and registered vCenter, but when you log in to the vSphere Web Client, you cannot see your NSX Manager. Where did it go? When deploying NSX-v, one of the initial steps involves registering vCenter server with NSX Manager. The section in the NSX 6.1 Installation guide reads as follows: Register vCenter Server with NSX Manager You must login to the NSX Manager virtual appliance to register a vCenter Server and review the settings specified during installation. ...

NSX-v allows the creation of Security Groups to group objects to be used in DFW rules and security policies. Each security group can have a mix of static and dynamic membership (If you want to get picky, you can also statically exclude objects). One of the possible ways to dynamically include members into the security group is to match on a security tag. This allows a VM to have security tags assigned to them, and based on the security tag, a VM can be dynamically added as a security group member. ...

When faced with migrating from a Checkpoint installation to a VMware NSX-v installation, at some point someone is going to need to get all the objects across to the new firewall platform. I was recently asked to help add some functionality to a script to take some data from an odumper csv output and pump it into NSX-v. The following script is a bit of a hack I put together. The script is based off one written by Brett Drayton (www.brettdrayton.com) in this post. ...

When using the NSX-v distributed firewall (DFW) have you ever need to find out if a service has already been configured in the system for a particular port number? Recently I was given a sample ruleset from a client to re-create in the DFW, and one thing that stood out was that when creating NSX firewall rules and faced with a random port number that needed to be configured for a rule, there is no easy way to find out if a service has already been configured using that port. ...

Over my years as a network engineer there has always been some element of scripting required. Whether it was formally required by a project, a particular situation or whether it was because i was sick of doing the same thing over and over again and wanted to make my life easier. As part of my new role at VMware, I get to play with NSX for vSphere or NSX-v, and one thing that becomes apparent, is that if you don’t learn how to use the REST API, there will be certain situations where you will not be able to achieve your desired outcome. The NSX REST API, can be used to configure items which are not exposed in the UI, or you can use your favourite scripting language and script repetitive tasks. ...

Sunday 1st February saw the first Cars and Coffee meet at Cavallino for the year. It was also our first time attending the event. I had heard and read lots about this monthly meet up but nothing prepared me for the sheer amount of people and cars roaming the quiet streets of Terry Hills at 8am on a Sunday morning. We aren’t talking small numbers of cars here, we are talking hundreds!!!! ...

Whilst deploying a NSX 6.1 and vRA 6.1 lab for some testing, I came across a peculiar error in regards to deploying a 1-arm load balancer. Essentially it wouldn’t work! When vRA was trying to execute the multi-machine blueprint, it would provision all the VMs correctly and then destroy them shortly afterwards. The logs would show the following error. [Timezone] [Error]: VcoWorkflow 'Create Edge': Failed after 00:00:10.4947127, java.lang.RuntimeException: com.vmware.o11n.plugins.nsx.error.VsmException: VSM response error (10166): Invalid Configuration. To deploy NSX Edge appliances, at-least one Vnic must be configured and must be connected to a valid portgroup. (Workflow:Create edge / Scriptable task (item1)#57) So after a bit of research, it turned out that you need to apply a hotfix for vRA 6.1 when integrated with NSX. ...

Today marks the practice day for the World Time Attack Challenge which is held annually at Sydney Motorsport Park. The actual event is combined with Formula Drift and held over 3 days from Friday 17th October to Sunday 19th October. The time attack event is run on the Friday and Saturday and the Formula Drift event is on the Sunday. [caption id=“attachment_16” align=“aligncenter” width=“1024”] WTAC 2013 Champoins - Tilton Evo[/caption] ...