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Automating default admin password change for NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

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Over the weekend I got a chance to deploy my first vSphere with Tanzu environment using the new NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) which I had shared on Twitter.

This was also my first time getting exposed to NSX ALB (formally AVI Networks) and this detailed blog post from my buddy Cormac Hogan was instrumental in helping me quickly get started and get into the specific configurations needed for a two network design with vSphere with Tanzu. For me personally, there were just too many different configuration pages a user needed to navigate to and context switching between them made it non-intuitive for a new user like myself. After going through this once, I knew Automation was the next step for me and this was also an opportunity to try out the NSX ALB API, which I also have never used before.

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Retrieving network statistics on VMware Cloud on AWS using NSX-T Policy API

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One question that has come up lately from VMware Cloud on AWS customers is to understand their network traffic usage, especially as it pertains to traffic that exit or egress their SDDC. There are a number of graphical tools that can be used today to get insights into this information, one is the popular vRealize Network Insight Cloud solution which many of our VMware Cloud on AWS customers are taking advantage of to not only understand traffic usage and flow data history but is also instrumental in aiding customers when planning workload migrations from their on-premises datacenter to VMware Cloud on AWS.

While researching this topic, I also came to learn that this information can be retrieved using the NSX-T Policy API which is available to all customers to use. We are going to be leveraging the Tier-0 statistics interface API from NSX-T which will give us both transmit and receive stats on all supported interfaces. From the diagram below, we can see the interfaces that are applicable to VMware Cloud on AWS is the Internet interface which includes VPN traffic, VPC interface which includes traffic going to Linked VPC and Direct Connect interface which includes traffic when using AWS Direct Connect.

NSX-T Topology in VMware Cloud on AWS

As you might expect, these exact same three interface types is then represented as logical interfaces within the NSX-T Policy API which uses the following IDs:

  • cross-vpc
  • public
  • direct-connect

Note: Statistics on the Direct Connect interface will also include traffic if you are using the new VMware Transit Connect with AWS Transit Gateway feature.

These interface can be discovered by performing a GET on /policy/api/v1/infra/tier-0s/vmc/locale-services/default/interfaces and then you would then identify the two NSX-T Edge (Active/Passive) and construct the T0 URL to retrieve the statistics. I will not bore you with the details and have implemented this as a new PowerShell function called Get-NSXTT0Stats and for those interested in the implementation, please see the code here.

Note: For those wanting to see the full NSX-T Policy REST URLs, simply append -Troubleshoot flag and that will output additional information on how I am retrieving the various pieces of information required to call into the T0 Stats API.

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Configure NSX-T Edge to run on AMD Ryzen CPU

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The vast majority of VMware Homelabs is still Intel-based today but I have been seeing a slow rise of AMD-based kits being adopted, especially with AMD's desktop line of CPUs known as Ryzen. One of the considerations on whether you could use an AMD processor was whether you were planning to deploy NSX-T and in earlier releases, only Intel was supported as the NSX-T Edge required support for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and this was only supported with Intel-based processors.

With the latest NSX-T 3.0 release, AMD-based processors are now supported and per the release notes, the following CPUs can be used:

  • AMD EPYC 7xx1 Series (Naples)
  • AMD EPYC 3000 Embedded Family and newer
  • AMD EPYC 7xx2 Series (Rome)

You will notice that only AMD's server line of CPUs known as EPYC are currently supported, which makes sense for running Production workloads. If you attempt to deploy an NSX-T Edge Node running on a non-EPYC platform, you will get an error message stating the CPU is not supported and I figured this was probably due to the lack of DPDK support in the consumer CPUs.

Yesterday, in our internal "Homelab" Slack channel, I came across an interesting tidbit from Andrea Spagnolo, a Sr. Field Engineer in our Cloud Native Business Unit who shared a pretty neat trick on how to get latest NSX-T 3.0 release to work with a Ryzen-based CPU.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. The behaviors described here can change in the future

First off, I want to thank Andrea for sharing but also credit to Beniamino Guarnaschelli and his blog post here which actually gave Andrea the idea to take a closer look as he was trying to get this setup in his own personal homelab.

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