CloudArena: March 2020

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

NSX-V vs NSX-T Layer 2 and Routing comparison !!

NSX-V vs NSX-T Layer 2 and Routing comparison of equivalent technologies:

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Monday, March 16, 2020

Saturday, March 14, 2020

Overview of VMware Edge Services Gateway (ESG) and Distributed Logical Router (DLR)

VMware ESG vs DLR

ESG

DLR

- It’s always a VM.

- We use ESG for North-South. It means, going outside from datacenter towards the external network or internet.

- If you have logical switches in different transport zone, then you can use ESG.

- ESG is for different transport zone, but DLR is for same transport zone.

- It supports dynamic routing as well as static routing.

- It supports OSPF and BGP.

- It supports both the routing protocol at the same time.

- It is for centralized routing.

- Since it is a VM, so it can have maximum of 10 interfaces.

- On one interface, we can have maximum 200 sub-interfaces which will be connected as trunk interface.

- ESG has internal interface which connects with South. Means, it connects to DLR. (Transit Network).

- Physical router will be Uplink interface.

- It’s a kernel module.

- It splits in to two components.

DLR
DLR Control VM

- Name of DLR kernel module is nsx-vdrb. It exists on each ESXi hosts.

- We use DLR for East-West routing. Means, routing within your datacenter.

- Benefits of using DLR: -

- If we remove DLR, so where we have router? We have router on each ESXi host.

- DLR only do routing if logical switches are in same transport zone.

- When we deploy DLR, it activates on those ESXi host which participate in that transport zone.

- It supports dynamic routing as well as static routing.

- It supports OSPF or BGP.

- It doesn’t support both routing protocol at the same time.

- It is distributed routing.

- It has two interfaces as Internal and Uplink. And third uplink is related to management. Total 1000 interfaces.

- Internal Interface

- It connects towards the south. With Logical switches.

- Maximum it can have 991 interfaces.

- Uplink Interface

- It connects with either physical router or ESG.

- Maximum it can have 8 uplinks

- Management Interface

- Number of interfaces is 1

- Total 10000 interface can be on single host.

- When we talk about cloud then we give one DLR to each tenant. Where they can create logical switches and connect to DLR.

- Maximum 250 DLR can be on single ESXi host.

Thursday, March 12, 2020

VMware NSX Overview

VMware NSX Introduction

IT organizations have gained significant benefits as a direct result of server virtualization. Server consolidation reduced physical complexity, increased operational efficiency and the ability to dynamically repurpose underlying resources to quickly and optimally meet the needs of increasingly dynamic business applications.

VMware’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) architecture is now extending virtualization technologies across the entire physical data center infrastructure. NSX for vSphere is a key product in the SDDC architecture. With NSX for vSphere, virtualization delivers for networking what it has already delivered for compute and storage. In much the same way that server virtualization programmatically creates, snapshots, deletes, and restores software-based virtual machines (VMs), NSX for vSphere network virtualization programmatically creates, snapshots, deletes, and restores software-based virtual networks. The result is a transformative approach to networking that not only enables data center managers to achieve orders of magnitude better agility and economics, but also allows for a vastly simplified operational model for the underlying physical network. With the ability to be deployed on any IP network, including both existing traditional networking models and next-generation fabric architectures from any vendor, NSX for vSphere is a non-disruptive solution. In fact, with NSX for vSphere, the physical network infrastructure you already have is all you need to deploy a software-defined data center.

NSX Components

NSX can be configured through the vSphere Web Client, a command line interface (CLI), and REST API.

Interaction between NSX components.

NSX Manager

The NSX Manager is the centralized network management component of NSX, and is installed as a virtual appliance on any ESXTM host in your vCenter Server environment. It provides an aggregated system view. One NSX Manager Maps to a single vCenter Server environment and multiple NSX Edge, vShield Endpoint, and NSX Data Security instances.

NSX vSwitch

NSX vSwitch is the software that operates in server hypervisors to form a software abstraction layer between servers and the physical network. As the demands on datacenters continue to grow and accelerate, requirements related to speed and access to the data itself continue to grow as well. In most infrastructures, virtual machine access and mobility usually depend on physical networking infrastructure and the physical networking environments they reside in. This can force virtual workloads into less than ideal environments due to potential layer 2 or layer 3 boundaries, such as being tied to specific VLANs. NSX vSwitch allows you to place these virtual workloads on any available infrastructure in the datacenter regardless of the underlying physical network infrastructure. This not only allows increased flexibility and mobility, but increased availability and resilience.

NSX Controller

NSX controller is an advanced distributed state management system that controls virtual networks and overlay transport tunnels. NSX controller is the central control point for all logical switches within a network and maintains information of all virtual machines, hosts, logical switches, and VXLANs. The controller supports two new logical switch control plane modes, Unicast and Hybrid. These modes decouple NSX from the physical network. VXLANs no longer require the physical network to support multicast in order to handle the Broadcast, Unknown unicast, and Multicast (BUM) traffic within a logical switch. The unicast mode replicates all the BUM traffic locally on the host and requires no physical network configuration. In the hybrid mode, some of the BUM traffic replication is offloaded to the first hop physical switch to achieve better performance.

NSX Edge

NSX Edge provides network edge security and gateway services to isolate a virtualized network. You can install an NSX Edge either as a logical (distributed) router or as a services gateway. The NSX Edge logical (distributed) router provides East-West distributed routing with tenant IP address space and data path isolation. Virtual machines or workloads that reside on the same host on different subnets can communicate with one another without having to traverse a traditional routing interface.
The NSX Edge gateway connects isolated, stub networks to shared (uplink) networks by providing common gateway services such as DHCP, VPN, NAT, dynamic routing, and Load Balancing. Common deployments of NSX Edge include in the DMZ, VPN Extranets, and multi-tenant Cloud environments where the NSX Edge creates virtual boundaries for each tenant.

NSX Edge Services

Dynamic Routing: Provides the necessary forwarding information between layer 2 broadcast domains, thereby allowing you to decrease layer 2 broadcast domains and improve network efficiency and scale. NSX extends this intelligence to where the workloads reside for doing East-West routing. This allows more direct virtual machine to virtual machine communication without the costly or timely need to extend hops. At the same time, NSX also provides North-South connectivity, thereby enabling tenants to access public networks.

Firewall: Supported rules include IP 5-tuple configuration with IP and port ranges for stateful inspection for all protocols.

Network Address Translation: Separate controls for Source and Destination IP addresses, as well as port translation.

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol ((DHCP): Configuration of IP pools, gateways, DNS servers, and search domains.

Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (VPN): Uses standardized IPsec protocol settings to interoperate with all major VPN vendors.

L2 VPN: Provides the ability to stretch your L2 network.

SSL VPN-Plus: SSL VPN-Plus enables remote users to connect securely to private networks behind a NSX Edge gateway.

Load Balancing: Simple and dynamically configurable virtual IP addresses and server groups.

High Availability: High availability ensures an active NSX Edge on the network in case the primary NSX Edge virtual machine is unavailable.
NSX Edge supports syslog export for all services to remote servers.

Distributed Firewall

NSX Distributed Firewall is a hypervisor kernel-embedded firewall that provides visibility and control for virtualized workloads and networks. You can create access control policies based on VMware vCenter objects like datacenters and clusters, virtual machine names and tags, network constructs such as IP/VLAN/VXLAN addresses, as well as user group identity from Active Directory. Consistent access control policy is now enforced when a virtual machine gets vMotioned across physical hosts without the need to rewrite firewall rules. Since Distributed Firewall is hypervisor-embedded, it delivers close to line rate throughput to enable higher workload consolidation on physical servers. The distributed nature of the firewall provides a scale-out architecture that automatically extends firewall capacity when additional hosts are added to a datacenter.

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

vRB not getting registered with vRA 7.6 version, error "Invalid data format"

Not able to register vRB with vRA 7.6 version

During my upgrade of vRB, i had encountered with vRB registration with vRA.
This is known issue as of now with vRB and VMware is aware as well. there is a fix for this.
Getting error "Invalid data format" while registering with vRA.

1. SSH to vRB appliance and go to "/usr/local/tomcat/shared-lib"
2. check if any .jar files exist there or not. In my case, there was no .jar files located under this directory.
3. I got shared lib .jar files from VMware for vRB 7.6 version.
4. Once got the .jar files from VMware, follows below steps. If you need vRB 7.6 versions .jar files, comment me on this post, i will provide that.
5.***** Take a snapshot of the vRBC appliance again *****

i. SSH to vRB appliance and run command "monit stop all"
ii. Put all the jar files to "/usr/local/tomcat/shared-lib/"
iii. Run command "monit start all"
iv. Re-Register the vRB appliance with vRA.

This time vRB will get register with vRA without any issues.

CloudArena

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

NSX-V vs NSX-T Layer 2 and Routing comparison !!

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Top KB Articles for VMware vSphere !!

Top KB Articles for VMware NSX !!

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Top KB Articles for VMware vSAN Troubleshooting

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Top KB articles for VMware Workspace One Troubleshooting

Top KB Articles for VMware Horizon troubleshooting

Monday, March 16, 2020

Top KB Articles for vRealize Operations Manager Troubleshooting

Top KB articles for vRealize Automation troubleshooting