Networking Archives - Page 3 of 14

GRE Tunnels & Dynamic Routing in NSX 6.4

February 23, 2018 / Martijn / 2 Comments

There was a line in the NSX 6.4 release notes that caught my eye: “Support for BGP and static routing over GRE tunnels.” – First thought was “awesome, dynamic routing over a VPN”. But then I realized that that GRE tunnel in itself is a new feature as well, which the release notes don’t really mention. The VMware Docs website also doesn’t mention anything about it.

After a bit of digging, it appears that this feature has been added primarily to support the VMware on AWS architecture and connectivity towards that platform. But that doesn’t mean us mortals can’t use … Read more

CiscoLive EMEA 2018 – Presentation PDFs

February 11, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

After attending CiscoLive EMEA in Barcelona last week, I wanted to get the break-out presentations for reference and to revisit sessions I couldn’t make it to. While the CiscoLive website isn’t bad, it’s not great either and I found myself spending too much time to search and go through the available presentations.

Luckily, the content catalogue seemed to use an open API with a central repository of all session data (including the session id, title and PDF url). I was able to grab it and parse it into a simple list of session id, title, type and category with a … Read more

NSX for vSphere 6.4 is here (and it’s massive!)

January 16, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Just as the title says, NSX-v 6.4 has just dropped. I my opinion, they should’ve called it NSX-v 7.0 though, considering the amount of new and cool stuff that is in there. I’ll go through the most prolific new and shiny features below.

Distributed Firewall Layer 7 Functionality – App ID

Traditionally the DFW could handle layer 2 to layer 4 rules. With NSX 6.4, there is some layer 7 functionality which becomes available. This is done by pushing a new VIB to ESXi hosts which looks inside the traffic flows. This new module will recognise App ID inside network … Read more

Restoring a NSX Edge Gateway

December 23, 2017 / Martijn / 0 Comments

NSX Manager has a backup and restore functionality. That process creates a backup of the entire NSX fabric and puts that backup on a remote (s)FTP server. All configuration is available within that backup, the Edge configuration is not separate. Being a good IT-citizen, of course the backup is one of the configurations you do during the installation, so you always have a backup available.

I have a couple points for this post:

You can restore a NSX Manager backup non-disruptively (*),
When you restore a NSX Manager backup, existing NSX Edges are not effected and continue to operate,
If

NetFlow on Physical switches with vRealize Network Insight

December 3, 2017 / Martijn / 0 Comments

With the release of vRealize Network Insight 3.6, the flow analyser inside vRNI now supports external sources for NetFlow. This means you can perform micro segmentation planning on physical servers (before you migrate them to virtual) and create deep insight into what network traffic is going through your entire network (and not just limited to what’s happening in your virtual network).

Currently, NetFlow versions 5, 7, 9 and IPFIX are supported. Getting started with NetFlow in vRNI is pretty easy, but it is slightly more complicated than regular data sources.

Getting Started

I say it’s slightly more complicated, because … Read more

Host Preparation Troubleshooting Enhancements with NSX 6.3.5

November 23, 2017 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware NSX 6.3.5 was released last week. This is a maintenance release and addresses 32 issues in previous versions. You can find the release notes here.

One thing caught my eye which is a very welcome addition to 6.3.5;

Host prep now has troubleshooting enhancements, including additional information for “not ready” errors

As the release notes don’t go into detail what that exactly means, I did some digging. From 6.3.5 and above, the NSX UI will now show the failure messages from EAM when the host preparation fails. For instance, you’ll see if the communication between EAM and the … Read more

How to define two NetFlow targets in vSphere VDS

July 27, 2017 / Martijn / 2 Comments

Sorry, you actually can’t configure two Netflow targets in vSphere. 😉

HOWEVER! There’s a way around this limitation. Currently, the VDS only supports one Netflow target IP address to send NetFlow to. This limitation can cause some issues when you want to employ multiple Netflow collectors, for instance an existing Network Management System (NMS) and do a vRealize Network Insight Assessment.

What is Netflow?

I’m not going to explain Netflow in depth, but just to set the stage here’s a small summary. Netflow is a protocol that allows you to collect information about what traffic flows are going through … Read more

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