Networking Archives - Page 5 of 14

NSX SpoofGuard Automatic Approvals through your IPAM

October 4, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware NSX provides a (heavily underestimated) SpoofGuard functionality, which prevents virtual machines to use IP addresses that are not approved by the network engineers. It guards for, guess what, IP spoofs. Virtual machines will not be able to change their IP addresses without administrative approval, which prevents issues with unauthorized changes or duplicate IPs.

SpoofGuard in NSX

SpoofGuard can operate in 3 modes:

– Approve everything (the default);
– Automatically approve first detected IP, manual approve changes;
– Manually approve all first detected IPs and changes.

While having control of the IP address changes in the virtual network is pretty … Read more

Please stop stretching your VLANs, virtualize your network

August 9, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Network admins hate stretching VLANs across data centers, we absolutely hate it. It causes potential instability on a inter-data center scope, destroys our isolated fault domains; something happens with VLAN X on site A, it also can take down site B (unless you take special precautions). I spent a few hours last week and the week before to help out customers that had that exact issue, which triggered this post.

The entire idea of stretching VLANs between data centers is about virtual machine mobility. You can do a failover between sites and don’t have to make adjustments to your applications … Read more

VMware NSX 6.2.3 – SSL VPN Behaviour Change

July 11, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

NSX 6.2.3 was released a few weeks ago and brought a bunch of new stuff and fixes. I came across an undocumented change not mentioned in the release notes, which caused me some head ache, this post describes that change.

The NSX Edge Services Gateway can provide you with a SSL-VPN solution, making it possible for road-warriors to connect to the secured virtual network or make it possible for developers to connect to duplicate development environments. The SSL-VPN client is a lightweight and easy to use VPN client and you can set all kinds of policies as the VPN … Read more

Removing the VMware NSX Solution from vCenter

July 5, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

If you want to remove VMware NSX from your vSphere environment, it’s as simple as reversing the installation steps (remove logical network configuration, remove NSX Service VMs, remove the NSX VIBs from the ESXi hosts and remove the NSX Manager). NSX is completely managed through the vSphere Web Client connecting to your vCenter. After you have reversed the installation steps, you are left with the NSX solution inside the vSphere Web Client.

Removing the NSX Solution from vCenter

Inside vCenter there’s the Managed Object Browser (MOB), which has access to all objects in the vCenter system and you can … Read more

VMware NSX 6.2.3 released

June 10, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware NSX 6.2.3 was released today and it’s a good one! There’s a lot of improvements and some new stuff in there, it’s a hell of a maturing release. Below are a few highlights.

NSX for vShield Endpoint license

There’s a default license generated when you install NSX now, and it defaults on the NSX for vShield Endpoint license. This means you can by default (and without cost) manage anti-virus offloading functionality. This is one step closer to a vShield replacement and an open download.

NSX Hardware Layer 2 Gateway Integration

This has been in the works for a while … Read more

Deploy and configure VMware NSX in 23 minutes

May 26, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware NSX is completely software based. This means it’s flexible as heck and you can have a lot of instances running concurrently. It also means you can go crazy with your network topology designs and amount of tinkering you can do with your virtual network. I am someone who loves to tinker. Sometimes a bit too much. A consequence of this, is that I sometimes break my virtual test lab and have to re-install it and return to the starting point. This has happened a few times.

I also like to use clean labs for customer demo purposes, just to … Read more

PowerShell Friday: Using the Cisco ACI API

May 20, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

One of the great things of all network virtualization solutions, is that they can be automated using some form of API that they publish. Cisco ACI is no different and offers a RESTful API which you can consume to do stuff on the network. Well, it’s a ‘sort-of’ RESTful API, as they only seem to use GET and POST functions, no DELETE, PUT, etc. Instead to delete an object, you do a POST with the status ‘deleted’. Anyway, details.

PowerTool

Cisco has a PowerShell implementation for multiple products, for example UCS and ACI. They call their module PowerTool and is … Read more

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