William Lam

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2019 EU Sessions

11.07.2019 by William Lam // 6 Comments

VMworld EU 2019 officially wrapped up 45min ago (as of writing this) and this was another amazing VMworld. I really enjoyed all the great conversations from customers, partners and fellow VMware colleagues. Although many of us are running around the entire week for sessions and meetings, we certainly appreciate it when folks stop us and just hi or even ask for a picture.

I also want to personally thank everyone who attended my sessions and hopefully you got something out of it. Please consider leaving feedback on the VMworld Survey on what you enjoyed and things that we can improve upon for future VMworlds. Now that I am officially done, I figure I would have a beer and do some quick scripting.

Simliar to VMworld US, the VMworld team has already processed and published a number of recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2019.

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Customizing the NSX-T Login UI

10.29.2019 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I have been doing some automation with NSX-T 2.5 lately and for troubleshooting and validation purposes, I obviously make use of the NSX-T UI. After each new deployment I need to login to verify a few things. Out of pure laziness, I really would like to be able to login with just a single click for development purposes. I certainly could use password manager but it would still be a couple of clicks but I was looking something slightly quicker and that could easily work in a number of environments that I have.

Looking around the filesystem of the NSX Unified Appliance, I found the structure for the login UI to be fairly similiar (thanks to VMware Clarity) to that of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I found that I could apply the same techniques I had used to customize the VCSA Login UI including setting up pre-filled credentials (no recommended for obvious reasons) on the NSX-T Appliance.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk. Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore back the system defaults.

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How to debug NSX-T API Automation with PowerCLI?

10.25.2019 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I recently needed to deploy the latest version of NSX-T (2.5) for some work I was doing with Project Pacific and of course it was related to Automation 🙂 It has been some time since I have touched the NSX-T Manager API (2.0) and although most of my existing code still worked, there were some things that broke due to API deprecation and also net new functionality that I needed to use.

I normally use PowerCLI for my Automation work and/or for prototyping purposes, not only is it easy to do but PowerCLI is still one of the most popular tool used by our customers and it means that they can easily benefit from my work. However, one of my pet peeves when working with the NSX-T APIs and PowerCLI is simply the lack of useful error messages. Here is the generic error message that you would normally see even checking the $Error[0].Exception.ServerError variable, it generally does not contain anything useful or actionable.

A server error occurred: 'com.vmware.vapi.std.errors.invalid_request': . Check $Error[0].Exception.ServerError for more details.

Here is a concrete example where I am attempting to create a new Transport Zone but I am purposing leaving out a required parameter and as you can see from the output, the same generic error message is shown and not very actionable.

I normally debug NSX-T API issue whether it is a syntax or usage problem by SSH'ing to the NSX-T Manager and monitoring the actual API logs to figure out what is actually going. It usually has exactly what I am looking for in terms of the actual server error message along with details on how to fix the problem.

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