PowerShell Archives - Lostdomain

Natural Language Searches with PowervRNI

November 1, 2021 / Martijn / 0 Comments

vRealize Network Insight 6.3 brought a new API endpoint: /search/ql. The QL stands for Query Language, which is the same language that’s used in the search bar. I added support for that endpoint in PowervRNI 2.0 with the cmdlet Invoke-vRNISearch. With this post, I’d like to explain why that’s the best since sliced bread. 😉

Previously, there was the /search API endpoint, but that used an internal query language. You would run a search in the vRNI interface, open up the browser Developer Tools and look for the internal query that went against the vRNI backend. You could … Read more

Managing GNS3 with PowerShell

May 3, 2021 / Martijn / 0 Comments

If you’re a network engineer or like to play around with networks, you’ve used GNS3 (or something similar, like VIRL) to simulate networks to prepare for live configuration changes, preparing for certifications, and maybe keep a demo lab. Part of the demo lab I maintain for vRealize Network Insight, is collecting from a GNS3 network.

Sometimes, you need to restart all, or just some of the nodes. In my case, periodic node restarts are to simulate router crashes, and sometimes the storage underneath GNS3 would error and some of the nodes have kernel panics. All reasons to restart the … Read more

PowervRNI 1.7: What’s New?

November 19, 2019 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Version 1.7 of PowervRNI was released yesterday, and this post covers what’s new in this version. If you’re not familiar with PowervRNI, it is a PowerShell module that you can use to manage vRealize Network Insight. From adding data sources & applications, to retrieve data from it, such a network flows, PowervRNI covers most of the public API endpoints of Network Insight.

What’s New?

A bunch! First off, it has been updated to support the new data sources and API calls that have been added in Network Insight 5.0. Second, I’ve added a few backlog items. I’ll … Read more

Automating cleaning up NSX-T with PKS protected objects

August 15, 2019 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Building on the post that Jeffrey Kusters did on removing protected objects from NSX-T that PKS has created, I needed to automate this process for an environment which had 100+ of these objects.

First, a tiny bit of background; VMware PKS makes it pretty easy to deploy applications via Kubernetes and deploy them securely – because NSX-T is integrated and each Kubernetes objects will be firewalled, load balancers and can use other networking services to expose itself to the end users.

The integration between PKS and NSX-T is fully automated, and PKS creates protected objects (logical switches, logical routers, firewall … Read more

Storing the VMware NSX config in version control

April 30, 2018 / Martijn / 4 Comments

Almost any organization that I’ve had the pleasure of talking with, uses Git either for code repositories where their developers work or for doing version control on their infrastructure systems. Git is an excellent version control tool and is widely used for both developers and also infrastructure configuration. This post goes into how to put the VMware NSX configuration into version control using Git.

Not all infrastructure components (server systems, network devices, etc) have a proper audit log on what happens in the configuration and who is doing what exactly. This is where version control can lend a helping hand … Read more

VMware NSX & OTRS – Automating Security with Help Desk Systems

March 23, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Over the last couple of months, Sander, Anne Jan and I have been working on a security whitepaper that lays out a practical implementation of zero trust while interfacing with a helpdesk system. In this case, OTRS.

It’s all about how engineers can get access to servers to perform maintenance, once your environment is properly micro-segmented. This whitepaper talks about the challenges you have when you’re micro-segmented and how you can resolve these challenges. Using OTRS as an example, this document lays out how to configure a help desk system like OTRS to interface with NSX to gain network … Read more

Introducing PowervRNI

January 2, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

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

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