Recently I was having a discussion with one of my friend on NSX related topic and then I came to know about a new must have tool for your NSX based lab. Title of this post itself explains which tool I am talking about here.

What is vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) and where it came from?

vRealize Network Insight is a product for delivering intelligent operations for your SDN environment (specially based on NSX). vRealize Network Insight, allows a single pane of glass view of the VMware NSX environment. vRNI integrates with NSX to deliver intelligent operations for software defined networking.

In June,2016 VMware acquired a company called Arkin Net and named the product vRealize Network Insight. I read few blog where people used to refer this tool by nickname “vernie” and it sounds just exactly right. Cool name isn’t it?

What advantage vRNI offers?

With the help of vRNI you can optimize network performance and availability with visibility and analytics across virtual and physical networks.… Read the rest

Like last post of NSX series, this post is also focused on exploring a new tool which helps automatic NSX stuffs in your infrastructure. I first came across this tool when I was watching a VMworld 2016 Session titled NET7514 – PowerNSX and PyNSXv, but never got chance to play around this tool.

Now since I am exploring NSX automation these days, I decided to deploy the tool, in lab and use it. 

This post will be focused on just installation/configuration part and some examples on how to use this tool.

So what is PyNSXv?

PyNSXv is a high python based library that exposes ready to use work-flows and a CLI tool that can be used to control and automate NSXv in your infrastructure. 

It an opensource tool and is not supported by VMware and before using this in production, it is recommended to test it thoroughly in lab deployments. … Read the rest

These days I am busy exploring NSX Rest API in my lab and during the process I came to know about a cool tool named PowerNSX and decided to dedicate a blog on this to give respect to creator of this tool.

What is PowerNSX

PowerNSX is a PowerShell module that abstracts the NSX API to a set of easily used PowerShell functions. PowerNSX enables NSX administrators to drive their infrastructure programmatically.

PowerNSX add additional functionality to extend the capabilities of NSX along with exposing the existing Update, Remove and Get operations for all key NSX functions beyond the native UI or API.

PowerNSX have been developed by Nick Bradford. PowerNSX is available for download on GitHub and can be downloaded as the branch or zipfile.

Note: VMware does not support this module, and PowerNSX comes with no warranties express or implied. It is advisable to test this in Lab before using in a production environment.… Read the rest

In this post we will explore how NSX manager system info can be retrieved via Rest API. NSX manager appliance home page is itself very descriptive and provides all system info. 

In this post we will learn how the same system info can be explored via API calls. Let’s get started.

Query NSX Manager Information

Below API query will provide you info like what is the major and minor version of NSX appliance you are running along with patch number and build number

Example: curl -k -u “[email protected]” -X GET https://nsxmgr-01a.corp.local/api/1.0/appliance-management/global/info | tidy -xml -indent -quiet

… Read the rest

In this post we will learn how can we configure some of the network settings like DNS/Syslog and NTP configurations in NSX manager via Rest API.

We can do all this from NSX manager GUI also but if you are thinking about automating NSX manager deployment, then these Rest API knowledge can be pretty handy for configuring the appliance post its deployment.

Lets get started.

Query Network Settings

Below API query will give you an overview of NSX Manager IP settings, Hostname, DNS settings and domain name

# curl -k -u “admin:adminpwd” -X GET https://nsxmgr.alex.local/api/1.0/appliance-management/system/network/ | xmllint –format –

… Read the rest

In this post We will learn how to view generate self-signed certificate for NSX and replace the certificates after getting them signed from CA. We will be doing this via Rest API.

I wrote a post in past on how to replace SSL certs for NSX from GUI. In this post I am trying to achieve the same via Rest API

Following are the API queries which you need to execute in order to generate and replace certs.

Generate CSR Certificate

# curl -k -u “admin:passwd” -d @csr.xml -X PUT https://nsxmgr.alex.local/api/1.0/appliance-management/certificatemanager/csr/nsx

… Read the rest

In this post I will be demonstrating how to enable and disable high availability on NSX edge gateway using Rest API.

If you are new to NSX and do not know what edge gateway high availability means then I would recommend to read this Blog by Gabe Rosas.

We can enable disable high availability on edge gateway from vSphere Web Client by navigating to Home  > Networking & Security > NSX Edges > Selecting Edge > Manage > HA Configuration

Enabling HA on edge gateway will create a new vse vm in vCenter and both VM start exchanging heartbeat and exchanging other configuration etc.

Now we will see how to achieve this via NSX Rest API.

Step 1: Query HA Status

# curl -k -u “admin:passwd” -X GET https://nsxmgr.alex.local/api/4.0/edges/edge-2/highavailability/config | xmllint –format –

… Read the rest