Posts - Page 5 of 31

Archiving Network Flows from vRealize Network Insight to Log Insight

December 9, 2020 / Martijn / 2 Comments

vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) captures all traffic going through the network. It stores the traffic in flow records, and these are made up out of a source, destination, protocol, and port number. The metrics are attached so you can get a nice graph of the traffic behavior.

After creating the flow, vRNI goes on and attaches a lot of context to that flow: Is it coming from a VM? Is there a firewall rule attached? Which vCenter is this flow going through? What kind of SD-WAN Policies are attached? If any of this context changes (i.e., a VM got renamed), … Read more

SmartNIC – The Next Step in Networking

November 16, 2020 / Martijn / 1 Comment

There has been more and more talk about something called SmartNICs. Development originally started with AWS as an internal project for their cloud, simplifying their network operations and making the physical network devices simpler, dumber, and easier to manage. To me, this evolution is the next step in the networking layer.

The reason why is simple. For the last few years, the industry is moving away from complicated configurations in individual network devices, to simpler configurations in centrally managed controllers. Abstracting away complexity while we scale, is key there. By moving the network configuration to the server NICs, instead of … Read more

Exporting Dashboards from vRealize Log Insight with Python

November 2, 2020 / Martijn / 0 Comments

You can create some pretty cool and quick dashboards with vRealize Log Insight. Send it some data, set some filters, and create widgets that represent the data in a good way.

I just finished creating some good usage dashboards for the vRealize Network Insight Field Demo instances we have. The NGINX logs are sent via the log insight agent to vRLI, and then I filter out the unique visitors, popular searches, pinboards, and more. I wanted to see how often the field demo gets used and what’s being used.

The only problem is that vRLI doesn’t support generating scheduled reports, … Read more

Deploying a VMware SD-WAN Edge to AWS

September 20, 2020 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Formerly known as VeloCloud, the VMware SD-WAN solution is a combination of hardware (the branch routers) and software. The software is the magic sauce, which they prove by providing virtual Edges for vSphere, so you can place the edge anywhere. vSphere isn’t the only virtual format; they’ve also made it available for AWS, Azure, AliCloud, and GCP.

I’ve been deploying regional (US, EMEA, APJ) POPs of SD-WAN HUBs to better replicate an enterprise SD-WAN in the vRealize Network Insight demo lab (more on that in a future post), and ran into some things to take notice of, or even fix … Read more

VMworld 2020 – Session Picks

September 6, 2020 / Martijn / 0 Comments

This year has been tough, but luckily time is flying by. VMware’s flagship event, VMworld, is just a few weeks away! Due to everything, VMworld is virtual this year, and most of the content is free to check out. There is a Premier Pass, which will get you 1 on 1 sessions, workshops, and the certification discount you typically get with a VMworld pass.

There are some 774 (and growing) sessions that will be available during this event on the free pass! Have you registered yet?

Picking Sessions

Now that the schedule builder is live, you can start … Read more

Configuration Backups of vRealize Network Insight

July 22, 2020 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Similar to my last post, I found another small gem in the vRealize Network Insight 5.3 release: the ability to backup all configuration within the Platform.

Unsupported

Before you continue reading, please note that this is an unsupported feature right in 5.3. It’ll be officially supported later this year. Having said that…These new API endpoints in the API Explorer caught my eye:

Snapshots

Currently, the supported method of creating backups of Network Insight is to power down the VM, take a snapshot, backup that snapshot, and power the VM back up. Needless to say, that needs some work. I … Read more

Syncing Flows between vRealize Network Insight Collectors

July 17, 2020 / Martijn / 0 Comments

There are a few reasons you’d want to have multiple Network Insight instances collecting data from the same data sources. Maybe one is a staging instance, and the other is a production instance. Perhaps you’re rebuilding Network Insight on another instance (and can’t move the existing one), but do want to have them running parallel for some time. I could go on.

One of the challenges is being able to collect network flows in both instances, as vSphere can only send flows to a single collector IP. You could solve this with a NetFlow duplicator, but now there’s another … Read more

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Page 5 of 31