Monthly Archives: December 2020

HCX Integration With VMware Cloud Director 10x

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This blog post provides an overview of the HCX installation workflow for VMware Cloud Director based Clouds.

The below diagram taken from VMware official docs shows the high-level architecture of HCX architecture for VCD based clouds.

HCX Cloud System & Network Requirements

Before starting HCX Cloud installation, please ensure that you’ve met all the System and Network Port/Protocol requirements. These are documented Here

Firewall Requirements

  • The site’s WAN firewall will need to allow inbound HTTPS connections destined for the HCX Cloud. HCX Cloud will make outbound HTTPS requests.
  • The HCX Cloud site firewall also needs to allow inbound UDP-500 and UDP-4500 connections destined for the HCX appliances.
  • All other flows allow HCX to integrate with VMware SDDC components, typically these are not firewalled within the datacenter

The below diagram shows various ports that must be allowed in the firewall for a successful HCX cloud deployment in the destination environment.

VMware Cloud Director Pre-requisites

Make sure the following is already configured in VCD:

1: VCD Public Address is set and load balancer cert is imported (for multi-cell deployment)

2: RabbitMQ is installed and configured into VCD. … Read More

Upgrading HCX Interconnect Appliances via API

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HCX Interconnect appliances are deployed from the OVA’s which are included in the HCX Manager appliance. When HCX Manager is upgraded to a newer version, it contains the corresponding upgrade bits for IX appliances which are used to upgrade the IX components. 

There is a GET /appliances API call which when fired, looks for newer versions of OVA.  Once the newer version of ova is found, its version is then compared with the version of the deployed appliance. If both versions are the same, no action is taken. However, if the deployed version is lower than the newly discovered version, info about the upgrade is returned in the API call response. 

Below are the API calls which we need to execute for upgrading IX appliances.

Step 1: Obtain Auth Token

… Read More

Upgrading HCX Manager via API

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While working on an HCX related request from one of the hyperscaler, I came across an interesting ask where hyperscaler is looking for automating HCX upgrade via API. 

On checking HCX’s official API guide and swagger documentation and did not found any API to upgrade the HCX Manager appliance. The only available API’s are to upgrade HCX interconnect appliances.

After searching through internal documentation for an hour, I did not found any concrete info and I decided to explore the Network Inspect option in a browser which exposes APIs for any operation you trigger from UI. 

In this post, I am going to demonstrate what are the API calls needed for a successful HCX Manager upgrade. 

Disclaimer: HCX Manager upgrade APIs are not yet supported officially and will be shipped with the upcoming release of HCX.

Step 1: Check HCX Appliance Current Upgrade Status

Although this step is optional, I would recommend verifying the current upgrade status to ensure you do not accidentally attempt to upgrade an appliance that is already on the target version. … Read More