CategoryVMware

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

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

Introducing PowervRNI

I am excited to introduce PowervRNI to the world! In the 3.6 release of vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) in November, there was a public API added. Through this API, you can offload certain tedious tasks like creating applications and managing data sources. I was using the private API for a couple of things already, like importing data sources. With the release of the public API, I could move those things to use the public (and supported) API. Ever since then, I've been working on PowervRNI.

PowervRNI

The first release of PowervRNI is on GitHub here. With this … Read more

Restoring a NSX Edge Gateway

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:

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

NetFlow on Physical switches with vRealize Network Insight

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

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

vRealize Network Insight Search Cheatsheet

One thing that I absolutely love about vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) is that the entire database is open by default and that the search bar is powered by Elastic Search. That means that you can type in pretty advanced search queries and basically query everything that vRNI collects. The query itself is written in natural language, so you don't have to be an expert to use it. You can get really creative as well, getting output you would have a hard time seeing without using the search. To give you some examples, below you can find my cheatsheet with searches … Read more

Getting a list of VDS Portgroups from the vCenter Database

Disclaimer: this is not something for production environments (at least, I hope for your sake, GSS should be able to fix it), but more for test or homelab environments.

Say your vCenter is broken. And I mean really really broken to the point where you can't get the services to run anymore and you either go through a VMware GSS case and hope they can fix it. I'm good at breaking things and somehow (don't ask) got to a point where I had broken the SSO and Inventory services and couldn't get them back up.

I'm not a fan … Read more

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