What is L2 VPN?

From VMware NSX Administration Guide

With L2 VPN, you can stretch multiple logical networks (both VLAN and VXLAN) across geographical sites. Virtual machines remain on the same subnet when they are moved between sites and their IP addresses do not change.

L2 VPN thus allows enterprises to seamlessly migrate workloads backed by VXLAN or VLAN between physically separated locations. For cloud providers, L2 VPN provides a mechanism to on-board tenants without modifying existing IP addresses for workloads and applications.

Below diagram shows how a VXLAN was extended between sites using L2 VPN

                                                 Graphic Thanks to VMware

Lets jump into lab and configure a L2 VPN.

Before deploying/modifying any ESG for L2 VPN connectivity, we need a trunk portgroup on vDS. In  my lab I have created a dvportgroup in both site A & B. 

L2 VPN Server configuration

To configure a L2 VPN, double click  on edge where you want to configure server settings and navigate to Manage > Interfaces and edit the first availble free vNIC.… Read More

SSL VPN on NSX Edge Gateway allows end-user to connect to a private network through a SSL-VPN tunnel so that the end-user can access the application/services which are hosted on remote site, on their local network. Application/services can be accessed via Web-based SSL client or a regular client. 

Below image taken from NSX Administration Guide demonstrates the process of connecting to private network via SSL-VPN

                                           Graphic Thanks to VMware

To configure SSL VPN, double click on the Edge Gateway and navigate to Manage > SSL VPN-Plus tab. 

Go to Server Settings and click on Change button.

Select the ESG IP to which end user will connect via SSL VPN and select the appropriate encryption algo. make sure port 443 is populated. Hit OK to save settings.

Go to IP Pool page and click on + button to add a pool of IP. 

This is the local IP which end user gets when they connect to SSL VPN. … Read More

NSX Edge Services Gateway supports site to site IPSec VPN. You can create IPSec VPN between an ESG and any other network device (hardware/software) which supports IPSec or you can have ESG at both source and target site for this purpose. 

Using IPSec VPN, you can create a secure connection between two sites and route the internal subnets between those two sites. Just ensure you don’t have an overlapping subnets behind the edge gateway. You can create more than one IPSec tunnel on ESG and number of tunnels is directly dependent on size of NSX edge. 

As per VMware NSX Administration guide, Number of IPSec Tunnels that can be created per ESG is as follows:

Following are the algorithms which are supported by NSX IPSec VPN:

• AES (AES128-CBC)

• AES256 (AES256-CBC)

• Triple DES (3DES192-CBC)

• AES-GCM (AES128-GCM)

• DH-2 (Diffie–Hellman group 2)

• DH-5 (Diffie–Hellman group 5)

• DH-14 (Diffie–Hellman group 14)

• DH-15 (Diffie–Hellman group 15)

• DH-16 (Diffie–Hellman group 16)

Lets jump into lab now and learn how to configure IPsec VPN.… Read More

VMware released NSX 6.4.0. this month and this version brought many features, improvements and bug fixes which are outlined in the Release Notes

Before upgrading to NSX 6.4.1, check VMware interop matrix to make sure your underlying infrastructure is compatible with this version. Your VMware vSphere should be at 6.0 U2 or greater to upgrade to NSX 6.4

I am currently running NSX 6.3.5 in my lab and I thought to upgrade it to 6.4. I wanted to play with Rest API option for NSX manager upgrade, as from GUI I have done several times.

You can find the instructions about upgrade via Rest API on page 124 of NSX-6.3-API-Guide

Lets walk through this step by step.

1: Download the NSX upgrade bundle: NSX 6.4 upgrade bundle can be downloaded from here

2: Upload the upgrade bundle: I have downloaded the upgrade bundle on one of my linux box where I have curl installed and I will be employing curl to fire Rest API.… Read More