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VMware NSX

CloudNetworkingVMware NSX

Deploying VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 2 minutes read

Today’s topic is on VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (AVI). We will walk through the steps of deploying a NSX ALB overlayed on top of your NSX Environment.

Features

  • Multi-Cloud Consistency – Simplify administration with centralized policies and operational consistency
  • Pervasive Analytics – Gain unprecedented insights with application performance monitoring and security
  • Full Lifecycle Automation – Free teams from manual tasks with application delivery automation
  • Future Proof – Extend application services seamlessly to cloud-native and containerized applications

More information at VMware’s site here

What You Will Need:

  • A Configured and running NSX Environment
  • NSX ALB Controller OVA (controller-22.1.3-9096.ova)
  • Supported Avi controller versions: 20.1.7, 21.1.2 or later versions
  • Obtain IP addresses needed to install an appliance:
    • Virtual IP of NSX Advanced Load Balancer appliance cluster
    • Management IP address
    • Management gateway IP address
    • DNS server IP address
  • Cluster VIP and all controllers management network must be in same subnet.

Lets start with deploying controller OVF

I like to keep neat and consistent names the following names I utilized:

Virtual Machine Names:
  • nsx-alb-01
  • nsx-alb-02
  • nsx-alb-03

You need total of 3 Controllers deployed to create a High Available NSX ALB.

Click the Ignore All, or you will get this error as show below

Select your datastore ->

Click Next ->

My DNS Records:

  • nsx-alb-01.virtualbytes.io
  • nsx-alb-02.virtualbytes.io
  • nsx-alb-03.virtualbytes.io

We are deploying!

Access your first appliance via its FQDN that you have set in the steps above.

Create your password for local admin account

Create your passphrase, and your DNS resolvers, and DNS Search Domains.

Skip SMTP if not needed, but if you need a mail server please fill out your required SMTP IP and Port

  • Service Engines are managed within the tenant context, not shared across tenants to enable the Tenant Context Mode.
  • Service Engines are managed within the provider context, shared across tenants to enable the Provider Context Mode.

That is it for the initial deployment, next we will add our other 2 additional NSX ALB nodes for HA setup.

Go to Administration -> Controller -> Nodes

Click Edit ->

For your 2 additional NSX ALB nodes you will need to provide an IP Address and hostname and password.

Sample of what it should look like for all 3 ALB appliances

A simple topology of what we have deployed.

That is it! from now on you can configure for what use case you will NSX-ALB for. A next blog post will go through how to step up a NSX-T Cloud.

Licensing Flavors – If you click on the little cog icon next to the Licensing. You will see different tiers.

Different License Tiers that are apart of NSX-ALB Licensing model.

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VMware NSX

VMware NSX – Segment fails to delete from NSX Manager. Status is “Delete in Progress”

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 2 minutes read

Today’s troubleshooting tidbit – If you have issues removing a NSX Segment that got removed from NSX Policy UI but NSX Manager UI still shows that the segment is being used and active and cannot delete, well no problem at all. We will clean it up.

For More Reference VMware has a published KB for this here.

Below you will see that my vmw-vsan-segment that was stuck and said it was dependent on another configuration, but it was not. This segment was created from within VMware Cloud Director.

Confirm that there are no ports in use with the Logical Switch which was not deleted

Lets SSH into one of your NSX Managers, then we will execute the command below Run get logical-switches on the Local Manager CLI and confirm the stale Logical Switch is listed, and note its UUID

get logical-switches

 Elevate to root shell with command below

Engineering Mode

Use st en to enter engineering mode which is root privileged mode

st en

Confirm the Logical Switch info can be polled with API:
curl -k -v -H “Content-Type:application/json” -u admin -X GET “https://{mgr_IP}/api/v1/logical-switches/(LS_UUID)“

Example of my command below:

 curl -k -v -H "Content-Type:application/json" -u admin -X GET "https://172.16.2.201/api/v1/logical-switches/e2f51ece-99fe-417a-b7db-828a6a39234b"

Remove stale Logical Switch objects via API:
curl -k -v -H “Content-Type:application/json”  -H “X-Allow-Overwrite:true” -u admin -X DELETE “https://{mgr_IP}/api/v1/logical-switches/{LS_UUID}?cascade=true&detach=true“

Example of my command below:

curl -k -v -H "Content-Type:application/json"  -H "X-Allow-Overwrite:true" -u admin -X DELETE "https://172.16.2.201/api/v1/logical-switches/e2f51ece-99fe-417a-b7db-828a6a39234b?cascade=true&detach=true"

Now you should see a return ‘200’ response code if deletion is successful

That is all, we successfully cleaned up our NSX Segment that was stuck!

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EducationNetworking

VMware NSX Ninja Program

by Tommy Grot
written by Tommy Grot 1 minutes read

So where to begin? My goal I have is to become a VCIX within DCV and NV, but it will come soon! I have been passionate about learning and progressing my skill sets within VMware Solutions and creating complex environments, but with coming along with few folks at VMware which invited me into VMware NSX Ninja Program for NSX-T and VCF Architecture. As this Program is geared toward the Intermediate / Expert level it does challenge you but I have managed to succeed! I have finished Week 1 of 3, the VMware Certified Instructors are amazing they teach and walk-through real-world solutions which let you get a good understanding of the many bells and whistles that NSX-T and VCF can offer! As i go through the journey of the NSX Ninja, I will be adding more great content to this post! Stay Tuned 🙂

NSX Ninja Week 1 – Overview

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