nsx
-
A stretched cluster architecture facilitates for higher levels of availability and things like inter-site load balancing. It’s a common multisite solution and also part of VMware’s Validated Design for SDDCs with multiple availability zones. Traditionally compute networking in an active-active multisite setup has had its challenges, but with vSAN storage and NSX networking technologies that’s…
-
Recently a new version of the NSX-T Reference Design Guide was released. This guide, which now covers NSX-T versions 2.0 – 2.5, is a must read for anyone interested in the NSX-T solutions and their recommended design. One of the things you’ll find in the updated guide is a new recommended deployment mode for the…
-
Welcome back! In part 1 we had a look at some NSX-T management plane failure scenarios and how to recover from them. In this part we continue to investigate NSX-T recoverability at the data plane and more specifically the NSX Edge. Quick note If you ever experience an issue in your NSX-T production environment, the…
-
With NSX-T 2.5 comes NSX Intelligence 1.0. This component, which is part of NSX Data Center Enterprise Plus, is something I’ve been looking forward to since it was announced. NSX Intelligence adds a powerful analytics engine to the NSX-T platform. It provides workload and network context that is unique to NSX. Application owners and operations…
-
Like everything else in life, stuff can break in your NSX-T environment too. When that happens it’s important to understand how to get things back on track again. In the following blog articles I’m going through a couple of NSX-T failure scenarios and look at how to recover from them. As usual I’m doing this…
-
On August 30th 2019 I passed the brand new VMware Advanced Design NSX-T Data Center 2.4 exam. Let me tell you a little more about this exam and how I prepared for it. About the exam As far as I know 3V0-41.19 is the first ever design exam within the network virtualization certification track. A…
-
I recently passed the Professional NSX-T Data Center 2.4 (2V0-41.19) exam and in this short post I would like to share my experience with the exam and some recommendations for preparing for the exam. About the exam As with all VMware exams there is an excellent exam guide available. That guide should be the first…
-
Hi and welcome back. We’re looking into the NSX-T data path and investigating different points at which we can capture network traffic. You may remember from part one that virtual machine “app01” (172.16.2.50) is trying to ping another virtual machine called “web01” (172.16.1.53), but it’s receiving “request timeout”. We’re trying to find out where in the data…
-
Welcome back! We’re looking at how to gain visibility at different points in the NSX-T data path. You may remember from part one that virtual machine “app01” (172.16.2.50) is trying to ping another virtual machine called “web01” (172.16.1.53), but it’s receiving “request timeout”. We’re trying to find out where in the data path we’re having…
-
Having good insight into the different components of a network communication path is key when managing networks. This goes for physical networks and for software defined networks. Today I’m having a closer look at the NSX-T data path and more specifically how to capture network traffic at different reference points in the NSX-T data path.…
-
Anybody working with NSX micro-segmentation knows the importance of monitoring application traffic and the associated distributed firewall rules. Today I just want to share a simple and quick way to increase visibility in the NSX distributed firewall logs. For this short article I’m using NSX-T 2.4.1 and vRealize Log Insight 4.8. vRealize Log Insight has…
-
Wether you like it or not, the API plays a significant role when installing, configuring, and managing an NSX-T environment. Sooner or later you will be facing tasks that either require you to use the API or simply are much faster to complete using the API. Luckily, with the right tools and some preparation, getting…
-
One of the first things to configure after deploying the NSX Manager nodes is backup. No NSX-T implementation should ever get configured let alone go live without a working backup (and restore) in place. Let’s have a look at how to set this up. Backup target NSX-T uses SFTP (TCP port 22) to transfer backup…
-
For Role Based Access Control (RBAC) in NSX-T we need to configure integration with VMware Identity Manager. There’s an excellent VMware blog post that explains in detail how to set up vIDM and how to configure the integration in NSX Manager. The problem When setting this up myself I ran into a small problem that…
-
Back in February VMware announced version 2.4 of NSX-T calling it a “landmark release in the history of NSX”. The new and enhanced features introduced in version 2.4 are indeed impressive: Converged NSX Manager appliance – bringing together management, policy, and central control services in one appliance with 3-node clustering support. Thus we now have…
-
Welcome to the final part of this series. We’ve come a long way. After configuring North-South dynamic routing between the Tier-0 logical router and the “physical” (pfSense) router in part 5, it’s now time to add a Tier-1 logical router and some logical switches. Tier-1 logical router The purpose of Tier-1 routers is to facilitate…
-
Hi there again! I’ve made some good progress with my NSX-T lab deployment, but there’s still a lot to do! The plan Back in part three I made a high-level plan for the NSX data plane deployment. Let’s have a look: Prepare the vSphere distributed switch – part three Configure transport zones – part three…
-
Welcome back! I’m still busy installing NSX-T in my lab. I prepared the vSphere distributed switch, configured the NSX transport zones, and created the transit logical switches in part three. I will now continue with setting up the NSX transport nodes. Hypervisor transport nodes I’ll start with turning my ESXi hosts into NSX transport nodes.…
-
Welcome back! I’m in the middle of installing NSX-T in my vSphere lab environment. In part one I installed NSX Manager, in part two I deployed the NSX Controller Cluster. Now it’s time start working on what it’s all about: The data plane. High-level overview Setting up a complete NSX-T data plane involves installing and…