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NSX-T Edge OVF property to automatically join NSX-T Management Plane

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After publishing my vSphere 7 with Kubernetes automation lab deployment script, I was looking at my NSX-T Edge code which leverages the vSphere VM Keystroke API to automate the joining of the the NSX-T Edge to the NSX-T Management Plane. This technique is used to avoid the need for SSH access to both NSX-T Edge and Manager which is the official VMware method as outlined in the documentation for configuring the Edge.

This is certainly unfortunate as most customers normally disable SSH by default and only enable it for troubleshooting/debugging purposes. As far as I know, there are no remote NSX-T APIs for configuring an NSX-T Edge that has been deployed outside of NSX-T Manager, which has its own implications.

I recently had a chance to revisit some research I had made a note of when I had first started working with NSX-T. While inspecting the NSX-T Edge OVA, I found several OVF properties that begin with mp which per the description was referring to the NSX-T Manager. At the time, I was not able to figure out which the required combination of keys and values. Taking a closer look and poking around the appliance and logs, I was able to finally figure out the correct combination which turned out to be easy, once you knew what it was expecting.

To help demonstrate this functionality, I have created a basic PowerCLI script edge-auto-join-nsxt-management-plane.ps1 which uses information from your already deployed NSX-T Manager to automatically deploy the desired number of NSX-T Edge(s) which will automatically join the NSX-T Management Plane upon initial setup.


The way this works is that the following four OVF properties must be filled as part of the NSX-T Edge deployment:

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Automating the creation of NSX-T "Disconnected" Segments for DR testing on VMware Cloud on AWS 

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Disaster Recovery (DR) and Disaster Avoidance (DA) on VMware Cloud on AWS is still one of the most popular use case amongst our customers, just second to Datacenter Migration and Evacuation. The VMware Site Recovery service makes it extremely easy and cost effective for customers to protect their critical workloads without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Most often, the biggest cost of having a dedicated DR site is the on-going operational and maintenance cost of that infrastructure.

Most recently I have seen several requests come in where customers were looking to streamline their DR testing which is fantastic to hear. Just having a DR solution is not enough, you actually need to exercise it and verify that your workloads and applications are functioning as expected. Today, customers can verify that their applications are functioning as expected by creating NSX-T network segments that are "Disconnected" and then using a VM-based router to provide internal connectivity between these isolated environments.

Here is a screenshot of the VMware Cloud console and under the Networking & Security tab, when creating a new segment you can specify whether the segment is "Connected" (Routed) or "Disconnected".


Obviously, the NSX-T UI is just one way of creating a segment. In fact, most customers that have asked about this is wanting to do this via Automation which not only brings speed to testing but also consistency! With that, I have updated my NSX-T PowerShell Community Module for VMC to include two new updates. If you have never used this VMC module before, please take a look at the Getting Started guide here.

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Using PowerCLI to automate the retrieval of VCSA Identity Sources

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Similiar to automating the retrieval of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) password policies using PowerCLI, we can extend that example and leverage the Guest Operations API via Invoke-VMScript cmdlet to also retrieve the identity sources configured for a given VCSA without requiring SSH access.

I have created a new VCSA.psm1 PowerCLI Module which now includes the previous Get-VCSAPasswordPolicy function along with the new Get-VCSAIdentitySource function which accepts the name of the VCSA VM and root password to the VM as shown in the screenshot below.

If you need to add a specific Identity Source such as an Active Directory Domain which you have joined the VCSA, you can simply use Invoke-VMScript cmdlet and pass in the following command:

/opt/vmware/bin/sso-config.sh -add_identity_source -type nativead -domain vmware.corp