Month: September 2020

HCX Activation Key Management for Hyperscalers

Manish Jha

Disclaimer: This post is only intended for MSP & Hyperscalers only. Also below content is based on my learnings and I encourage reader of this post to cross verify things with VMware before executing/implementing anything. 

HCX is one of the key component in SDDC As a Service offering by hyperscalers (Google, Azure, CloudSimple, IBM, Oracle, Alibaba etc). HCX is consumed as SaaS offering in VMware SDDC’s on top of hyperscalers cloud. Automated deployment and configuration of HCX (cloud) is hyperscalers responsibility and this process becomes a bit complex when it comes to life-cycle management of HCX. 

One of the challenges with HCX is Activation key management. An activation key can have many states including:

1: Available: This is state of a freshly generated Activation key by a MSP. Keys that are in available state can be used to activate HCX appliances (Cloud/Connector).

MSP/Hyperscalers can generate activation keys (via API) to activate Tenant HCX-Cloud appliance.… Read More

HCX Mobility Groups

Manish Jha

VMware HCX is ultimate choice when it comes to migrating workloads to VMware SDDC running in cloud or a secondary site. Various migration techniques available with HCX makes life easy when it comes to planning migration for different kind of workloads. There are workloads which can incur some downtime while migration, on the other hand there are critical business applications which needs to be functional during entire duration of migration.

Current Challenges With Workload Migration

The most difficult part in any migration technology is Planning and Scheduling Migration Waves (which workloads should be migrated and when). Divergence of workloads (legacy, cloud native, microservices) have made datacenters more complex than ever. On top of that lack of clear and current documentation detailing the application landscape adds greater anxiety with every scheduled migration wave.

Architects spends a fair amount of time to understand application dependencies and correlation by conducting exhaustive interviews with application owners.… Read More

VMware HCX Replication Assisted vMotion

Manish Jha

Prior to Replication Assisted vMotion (RAV) feature, VMware HCX offered three distinct migration methodologies:

  • HCX Bulk Migration
  • HCX Cross-Cloud vMotion
  • HCX Cold Migration

I have explained about these methods in this blog post. Also working of these migration techniques are documented here and here.

Before jumping into what is Replication Assisted vMotion, let’s discuss about pros and cons of above mentioned techniques. 

  • Bulk migration is resilient over network latencies and also allows multiple VMs to migrated simultaneously, but VM’s do incur a small downtime during final switchover.
  • HCX VMotion migration on the other hand, keeps the application workloads live during entire migration window; but is sensitive to network latencies and jitter. Also we have limitation of 2 vMotion migration per ESXi host at a time.

RAV feature brings best of both these options in the form of cloud vMotion with vSphere Replication.

What is HCX Replication Assisted vMotion?

RAV migration is a new type of migration offering from HCX.… Read More

VMware HCX: Cloud to Cloud Migration

Manish Jha

Those who have worked on HCX, knows how easy it is to perform workload migrations from On-Prem datacenter to SDDC running in cloud. Bi-directional migration feature has helped customers to setup a true hybrid cloud infrastructure as app mobility was never so easy. To leverage HCX, your CSP will deploy HCX cloud on top of SDDC and provide you URL + Credentials, which you can feed into your on-prem HCX Connector appliance to get started with HCX. 

In this post I am going to demonstrate workload migration between two HCX Cloud instances. In a Multi-Cloud world, vendor lock-in is a thing of past and more and more customers are now using/evaluating services of more than one cloud provider.

HCX cloud-to-cloud migration will be helpful in putting brakes on CSP’s who are monopolizing their service offerings. Customers can now easily evacuate a given cloud and can seamlessly migrate to another cloud without any hassle.… Read More

HCX Network Extension

Manish Jha

VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) delivers secure and seamless app mobility and infrastructure hybridity across vSphere 5.0+ versions, on-premises and in the cloud. HCX can be considered a migration tool that abstracts both on-premises and cloud resources and presents them as a single set of resources that applications can consume. Using HCX, VMs can be migrated bi-directionally from one location to another with (almost) total disregard for vSphere versions, virtual networks, connectivity, etc. 

One of the coolest features of HCX is the layer-2 extension feature, and in this post, I will be talking about the same.

HCX Network Extension

HCX’s network extension service provides a secure layer 2 extension capability (VLAN, VXLAN, and Geneve) for vSphere or 3rd party-distributed switches and allows the virtual machine to retain an IP/MAC address during migration. Layer 2 extension capability is provided through the HCX Network Extension appliance, which is deployed during Service Mesh creation and permits VMs to keep their IP & MAC addresses during a virtual machine migration. … Read More

VRF Lite Configuration Validation

Manish Jha

In last post I covered the steps of configuring VRF gateways and attached Tier-1 gateway to VRF. In this post I am going to test my configuration to ensure things are working as expected. 

Following configuration was done in vSphere prior to VRF validation:

  • Tenant A VM is deployed and connected to segment ‘Tenant-A-App-LS’ and have IP 172.16.70.2
  • Tenant B VM is deployed and connected to segment ‘Tenant-B-App-LS’ and have IP 172.16.80.2

Connectivity Test

To test connectivity, I first picked Tenant-A vm and performed following tests:

A: Pinged default gateway and got ping result.

B: Pinged default gateway of Tenant-B segment and got the result.

C: Pinged Tenant-B VM and got result.

D: Pinged a server on physical network and got ping response.

Same set of tests I performed for Tenant-B VM and all test results passed.

Traceflow

Traceflow is another way of testing connectivity between vm’s. Below are my traceflow results for the 2 vm’s:

Here is the topology diagram created by NSX-T to show path taken by packet from Tenant-A-App01 vm to Tenant-B-App01 vm.… Read More

Configuring VRF Lite in NSX-T 3.0

Manish Jha

NSX-T provides true multi-tenancy capabilities to a SDDC/Cloud infrastructure and there are various ways of achieving it based on the use cases. In the simplest deployment architecture, multi-tenancy is achieved via connecting various Tier1 gateways to a Tier-0 gateway and each T1 gateway can belong to a dedicated tenant. Another way of implementing this is to have multiple T0 gateways, where each tenant will have their dedicated T0.

Things have changed with NSX-T 3.0. One of the newest feature that was introduced in NSX-T 3.0 was VRF (virtual routing and forwarding) gateway aka VRF Lite.

VRF Lite allows us to virtualize the routing table on a T0 and provide tenant separation from a routing perspective. With VRF Lite we are able to configure per tenant data plane isolation all the way up to the physical network without creating Tier0 gateway per tenant.

VRF Architecture

At a high level VRF architecture can be described as below:

We have a parent Tier0 gateway to which multiple VRF connects.… Read More

Enable BGP on VRF Via API

Manish Jha

Recently while working in my lab, I was trying to setup VRF Lite in NSX-T 3.0, I came across a bug which was preventing me to turn-on BGP on VRF gateway via UI. This bug has affected 3.0.1 and 3.0.1.1 versions of NSX-T. The error which I was getting when trying to enable BGP was:

“Only ECMP, enabled, BGP Aggregate to be configured for VRF BGP Config”

After researching for a bit, I figured out that currently there is no resolution of this issue and API is the only method via which BGP can be turned on on VRF gateway. Below are the steps of doing so.

Step 1: Find Tier-0 ID of the VRF Gateway

From above output, we can see VRF id is “TenantB-VRF”

Step 2: Find Locale Service ID of VRF Gateway

From above output, we can see Locale Service ID is “default”

Step 3:  Prepare json payload for BGP enablement

To find out syntax of json payload that we need to enable BGP on VRF, we can first grab the existing state of BGP

Step 4: Enable BGP on VRF

To enable BGP, we need to take complete API output from step-3 and change “enabled”: false to “enabled”: true and pass this output as payload of PATCH call.… Read More

Marking User Created Transport Zone as Default TZ in NSX-T

Manish Jha

For a freshly deployed NSX-T environment, you will find 2 default transport zones created:

  • nsx-overlay-transportzone
  • nsx-vlan-transportzone

These are system created TZ’s and thus they are marked as default. 

You can consume these TZ’s or can create a new one as per your infrastructure. Default TZ’s can’t be deleted.

Any newly created transport zone doesn’t shows up as default. Also when creating a new TZ via UI, we don’t get any option to enable this flag. As of now this is possible only via API. 

Creating a new Transport Zone with the “is_default” flag to true will work as intended, and the “is_default” flag will be removed from the system created TZ and the newly created TZ will be marked as the default one. 

Note: We can modify a TZ and mark it as default post creation as well. 

Let’s have a look at properties of system created transport zone.

To set a manually created TZ as default, we have to remove “is_default” flag from the system created TZ and then create a new TZ or modify existing TZ with this flag.… Read More

AVN Based Bringup Without BGP Support in VCF

Manish Jha

Application Virtual Network was first introduced in VCF 3.9.1. AVN networks are nothing but software-defined overlay networks that spans across zone of clusters and traverse NSX-T Edge Gateways for their North-South traffic (ingress and egress).

One of the requirement for an AVN enabled SDDC bringup was to configure BGP on NSX-T edges. In production environment, BGP routing is not an issue, but there are situations (Lab/POC) when you don’t have BGP support available and that can be an hindrance in implementing and testing AVN.

In this post I am gonna propose a workaround which you can implement in your lab to test this feature. To perform AVN based SDDC bringup, we can leverage static routes instead of BGP. Below are high level steps for doing so.

Step 1: Download VCF configuration workbook and fill in all the details. In Deploy Parameters tab of the spreadsheet, fill BGP specific details with some dummy data.… Read More