Category: NSX

An attendee of our Building Network Automation Solutions online course decided to automate his NSX-T environment and sent me this question:

I will be working on NSX-T quite a lot these days and I was wondering how could I automate my workflow (lab + production) to produce a certain consistency in my work.

I’ve seen that VMware relies a lot on PowerShell and I’ve haven’t invested a lot in that yet … and I would like to get more skills and become more proficient using Python right now.

Always select the most convenient tool for the job, and regardless of personal preferences PowerShell seems to be the one to use in this case.

A friend of mine told me about a “VXLAN is insecure, the sky is falling” presentation from RIPE-77 which claims that you can (under certain circumstances) inject packets into VXLAN virtual networks from the Internet.

Welcome back, Captain Obvious. Anyone looking at the VXLAN packet could immediately figure out that there’s no security in VXLAN. I pointed that out several times in my blog posts and presentations, including Cloud Computing Networking (EuroNOG, September 2011) and NSX Architecture webinar (August 2013).

After four live sessions we finished the VMware NSX Technical Deep Dive webinar yesterday. Still have to edit the materials, but right now the whole thing is already over 6 hours long, and there are two more guest speaker sessions to come.

Anyways, in the previous sessions we covered all the good parts of NSX and a few of the bad ones. Everything that was left for yesterday were the ugly parts.

Here's a trick question: how often do your Visio diagrams match what's really implemented in your network?

Wouldn't it be great to be able to create or modify them on-the-fly based on what's really configured in the network? That's exactly what Anthony Burke demonstrated in the PowerNSX part of PowerShell for Networking Engineers webinar (source code).

You’ll need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video.

When VMware launched the first version of NSX for vSphere more than four years ago, the NSBU team reached out to me and asked me to create a sponsored webinar describing NSX fundamentals, its architecture, and high-level deployment guidelines.

In the meantime we discussed updating the materials, but nothing ever happened. Time to fix that, this time from a vendor-neutral perspective. We’ll start with a day-long event on April 19^th 2018 in Zurich, Switzerland.

After introducing PowerNSX Anthony Burke illustrated how easy it is to use with a Hello, World equivalent: creating a logical switch (VXLAN segment).

You’ll need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video.

Want to know more about VMware NSX? We’ll run an NSX-focused event and a NSX Deep Dive workshop in Zurich on April 19th 2018, an overview webinar comparing NSX, ACI and EVPN on March 1st, and a deep dive in VMware NSX architecture later in 2018.

One of the beauties of VMware NSX is that it’s fully API-based – you can automate any aspect of it by writing a script (or using any of the network automation tools) that executes a series of well-defined (and well-documented) API calls.

To make that task even easier, VMware released PowerNSX, an open-source library of PowerShell commandlets that abstract the internal details of NSX API and give you an easy-to-use interface (assuming you use PowerShell as your automation tool).

One of my readers sent me a lengthy email describing his NSX-versus-ACI views. He started with [slightly reworded]:

What I want to do is to create customer templates to speed up deployment of application environments, as it takes too long at the moment to set up a new application environment.

That’s what we all want. How you get there is the interesting part.

I keep getting questions along the lines of “should I go with VMware NSX or should I deploy Cisco ACI” every single week, and as you know it’s hard to answer anything but it depends without spending hours on the topic.

That’s exactly what we plan to do in Zurich next Tuesday (May 16th) in a DIGS workshop that will run in parallel with the Data Center & Cloud Day (part of the SIGS Technology Conference).

Short update for those that read the original blog post: it turns out that the answer to the question “Is it possible to run VMware NSX on redundantly-connected hosts in a pure L3 data center fabric?” is still NO.

VTEPs from different ESXi hosts can be in different subnets, but while a single ESXi host might have multiple VTEPs, the only supported way to use them is to put them in the same subnet. I removed the original blog post.

A huge thank you to everyone who pushed me with their comments and emails to find the correct answer.

I’ll be doing several on-site workshops in the next two months. Here’s a brief summary of where you could meet me in person.

A bit of manual geolocation first: if you’re from Europe, check out the first few entries, if you’re from US, there’s important information for you at the bottom, and if you don’t want to travel Europe or US, there’s an online course starting in September ;)

I got a long list of VXLAN-related questions from one of my subscribers. It started with an easy one:

Does Cisco ACI use VXLAN inside the fabric or is something else used instead of VXLAN?

ACI uses VXLAN but not in a way that would be (AFAIK) interoperable with any non-Cisco product. While they do use some proprietary tagging bits, the real challenge is the control plane.

Does it make sense to run OpenStack on top of VMware infrastructure? How well does NSX work as a Neutron plug-in? Marcos Hernandez answered these questions (and a lot of others) in the Episode 61 of Software Gone Wild (admittedly after a short marketing pitch in the first 10 minutes).

I’m presenting at two Data Center Interest Group Switzerland events organized by Gabi Gerber in Zurich in early June:

• In the morning of June 7th we’ll talk about software-defined security, data center automation and open networking;
• In the afternoon of the same day (so you can easily attend both events) we’ll talk about VMware NSX microsegmentation and real-life implementations.

I hope to see you in Zurich in a bit more than a month!

A few months ago VMware launched NSX version 6.2, and I asked my friend Anthony Burke to tell us more about the new features. Not surprisingly, we quickly started talking about troubleshooting, routing problems, and finished with route-health-injection done with a Python script. The end result: Episode 50 of Software Gone Wild. Enjoy!