NSX | Virtually Limitless

NSX Home Lab Hardware Setup

August 7, 2016 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX 5 Comments

Hi Everyone, I know it has been a long time since I have posted (has it really been 6 months?!). I promise I will do my best to post on a more regular basis, especially since I have good hardware to play around with now. A little update before we get started: I am loving my new role as a Systems Engineer for NSX at VMware and couldn’t be happier where I am at. Over the last 6 months I have had to transition from a deeply technical, daily grind position in tech support, to a more customer focused, business […]
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Another Job Transition, here’s to the future!

February 5, 2016 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX 13 Comments

I have been super busy over the last few months which has kept me away from blogging and social media. For those who aren’t aware, I recently moved from an Escalation Engineer in support to a Systems Engineer for NSX. I couldn’t be more excited for this career move, and I couldn’t be more fortunate to be offered this opportunity. I truly believe SDN and NSX is the future of networking, and the last remaining piece of the SDDC stack. As everyone knows, my posts have already transitioned from vSphere and vCenter, to NSX, and I hope to continue that […]
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NSX 6.2 Centralized CLI, VXLAN

November 11, 2015 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX No Comment

Continuing my posts on NSX Centralized CLI, I wanted to dive into VLXAN commands next. I have included all of the logical switch commands below that you can run from the NSX Manager shell. There are almost 25 in total and I wanted to touch on what I feel are the most useful commands. show controller list all show logical-switch list all show logical-switch list vni host show logical-switch list host vni show logical-switch host verbose show logical-switch host config-by-vsm show logical-switch host statistics show logical-switch host vni verbose show logical-switch host vni mac show logical-switch host vni […]
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NSX 6.2 Centralized CLI, Edge Services Gateway

November 9, 2015 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX No Comment

As discussed in a previous post, we have developed a centralized set of commands that can be run from the NSX manager instead of having to get a session into each NSX component. In this post I will focus on the Edge Services Gateway centralized commands; we have pushed out more than 60 total commands and I will list them here and go through what I feel are the most useful subsets. It’s important to remember that these commands are only going to provide you with information, rather than allow you to make changes. I know this is a […]
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NSX 6.2 Communication Channel Health Check

November 5, 2015 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX 1 Comment

In NSX 6.2 we introduced a new feature to provide users with a way to check the communication channel between NSX Manager, the control plane agent (netcpa) and the firewall agent. If the channel is broken, the NSX manager will perform a sync operation to attempt to recover. The following communication channels are checked, along with their intervals below. NSX Manager to Firewall agent – A heartbeat is sent every 3 minutes, if two iterations are lost a sync will occur NSX Manager to Control Plane Agent – A heartbeat is sent every 2 minutes, if two iterations […]
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NSX controller deployment, deep dive, and connectivity verification

October 30, 2015 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX 2 Comments

I recently had a few customer’s run into some issues surrounding control plan connectivity. I wanted to compile a list of steps to verify that the control plane is in tact and doesn’t have any issues as well as provide useful commands to diagnose any issues. I wrote a previous post on how to Troubleshoot NSX Controller cluster status, roles, and connectivity, but I wanted to dive a little bit deeper this time. Deployment The first thing to mention, is again, that we recommend to deploy a total of three NSX controllers. NSX controllers store VM, ESXi, […]
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NSX 6.2 Centralized CLI, Distributed Firewall

October 23, 2015 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX 3 Comments

In NSX 6.2 we have developed a centralized CLI to help troubleshoot DFW, Edge, VXLAN, and DLR issues. The majority of these commands are only to gather information rather than make changes, but it allows our users to the opportunity to login into a single machine rather than logging into a controller, an edge, the manager and a host. All of these CLI commands will be run from the NSX manager and these specific distributed firewall commands are replacing the vsipioctl commands that you would typically run on an ESXi host. Below is a list of all of the […]
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Shifting Focus to NSX and VMware Integrated OpenStack

October 12, 2015 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX, Sean Whitney, VIO 3 Comments

It has been a few months since I have been in the blog game and I am going to step it back up. The reason for my absence over the last few months has been my recent transition within VMware. As many of you know, I was an Escalation Engineer on the Systems Operations team where I supported vCenter Server, ESXi, PSC, SSO, certificates, and anything generally related to the management of a vSphere Environment. In early July I moved over to the NSX and VMware Integrated Openstack team so I could focus on Software Defined Networking and the […]
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VXLAN vib agent installations fails immediately with the error “Agent VIB module not installed”

July 11, 2015 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX 4 Comments

I ran into an issue the other day in a new NSX lab deployment I was building out. Whenever I tried to prepare the ESXi hosts for VXLAN the install would immediately fail with no real good error messages; tasks and events displayed “Cannot complete the operation. See the event log for details.” Task: XXX eam.agent.enable.label not found XXX.”After digging a little bit deeper, I was able to find the following error message in my NSX Manager log. 2015-06-28T20:02:58.323-06:00 | ERROR | agent-4 | AuditedJob.java | 75 | JOB FAILED: [#2025773242] EnableDisableAgentJob(AgentImpl(ID:’Agent:7cd8e40b-7892-4755-977f-b847b4d35eae:bb36baa5-dd5d-46cc-b80c-eb38df42ff3c’)), com.vmware.eam.EamException: VibInstallationFailed 2015-06-28T20:02:58.324-06:00 | DEBUG […]
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Unable to deploy NSX VIBs after updating certificates in vSphere 6.0

June 17, 2015 by: Sean Whitney in: NSX 3 Comments

I ran into an issue the other day while helping a customer install the NSX agents on his ESXi hosts. Whenver we tried to deploy the agents to the host, we would get a generic error in the vSphere Web Client. To troubleshoot the issue, we first navigated to Home -> Administration -> vCenter Server Extensions and double clicked vSphere ESX Agent Manager. By clicking the Manage tab we saw no ESX Agencies / an error similar to: “Error while creating eam agency for deployment” In the NSX Manager log you see the following: show […]
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