Posts

When starting out with the NSX-v API, you will quickly learn that there are times where you are required to reference an object, like when you want to add a member to a security group, you are required to know the object ID of the object you want to add as a member to the security group, as well as the object ID of the security group itself. When using the NSX-v UI, you can try as hard as you want, but your aren’t going to be able to find the security group object ID. So how do you find it? ...

Every now and then I get asked by a colleague or client if there is a known issue with the vSphere Web Client and the NSX Plugin that causes the screen to go black. My response is to ask them the following questions: Are you using Firefox as the browser? Are you accessing the machine your using the browser on via RDP? So far the answers to the questions is always Yes to both of them! ...

While NSX 6.2.x has been out for a while now, most people should be aware of the newly introduced feature called the Central CLI. I won’t go into the details of what the Central CLI is, as you can read about it on Brett Draytons blog (link). What I do want to point out though is that the main method for accessing the Central CLI is via a SSH connection to the NSX Manager. As you may or may not be aware, the authentication used for SSH connections to the NSX Manager is not integrated with SSO, meaning it uses local authentication. ...

I was onsite implementing NSX-v for a customer, and part of the installation in this environment requires that we allocate the VTEP pnics to the VXLAN transport VLAN. To do this I had to liaise with the Network Operations guy. After laying it out for him that although these VTEP interfaces are going to be used for “VM Data” (his words, not mine) they will only need to be an access port in VLAN xxx, the penny finally dropped for this guy on why they are going the NSX-v route. ...

Have you ever had the problem of working on a unstable network connection and your network drops out. Well this happened to me this morning, but whilst it happened, I was actually connected to my NSX Manager via SSH and in configuration mode. When my network connectivity returned (4G) and I could SSH into the NSX Manager, I was greeted with the following: VTY configuration is locked by other VTY nsxmgr> ena Password: nsxmgr# conf t VTY configuration is locked by other VTY nsxmgr# I asked around internally and it turns out that there is currently no elegant way of disconnecting the session which has crashed. I will be following this up so that hopefully an elegant solution will be included in a future release. ...

One of the main reasons for customers wanting to implement NSX for vSphere is the fact there is a RESTful API which can be leveraged to drive the whole system. In a standard NSX-v installation, by default, the only account that has API only privileges (and no vSphere Web Client privileges) is the NSX Manager “admin” account. It is possible to use vSphere SSO accounts to interact with the NSX API, however this will also allow vSphere Web Client access (although they wont be able to view or access anything once logged on without granting specific vCenter rights). ...

Due to a recent lab rebuild, I needed to manually remove the NSX VIBs that were installed on my ESXi host, and thought I would document the process so I can remember it in the future. Removing the NSX VIBs from a host manually does not remove the configuration stored on the NSX Manager, so care needs to be taken when doing this. Depending on the version of NSX-v installed, the number of NSX VIBs installed will vary. ...

Whilst working on a little side project of mine, I wanted to be able to submit a REST API call against a NSX Manager. At first I was just going to use shell_exec to execute one of my python scripts, but after a bit of investigation, I found that I could use the PHP Client URL Library (cURL) . It took me a little bit of time to get it working just the way I wanted, but now that I have the basics, it should be simple to be able to do most things through a webpage. ...

Following on from my last post about the NSXRAMLCLIENT, I decided to setup an Ubuntu machine dedicated to being able to run the NSXRAMLCLIENT in my home lab. Using my own instructions that I had written previously to get it up and running on my OSX 10.10.5 machine, I came across a peculiar issue when trying to initiate a connection to the nsx manager. Here is the code I was running which works on my OSX machine without issues: ...

Up until now, my programmatic interactions with the NSX API have all been hacked together based on the NSX API Guide, due to the lack of a specific NSX API scripting interface. For typical vSphere scripting, there has been PowerCli and also pyvmomi and I am sure a few more I don’t know about, but nothing created specifically for NSX. This meant that for individuals like myself, who wanted to write scripts to interact with the NSX-v API through python, we would have to create all the API calls from scratch which is time consuming and then learn how to parse the responses and content. ...