WilliamLam.com

Configure NSX-T Enhanced Data path / Network Stack (ENS) for Nested ESXi

by // Leave a Comment

After publishing my Running Nested ESXi, NSX-V or NSX-T on top of NSX-T article which actually turned out to be quite popular, I received an interesting question on whether ENS for NSX-T could also be configured within a Nested ESXi deployment? I was a little familiar with ENS, which I will explain in a second. However, I was not completely sure about the benefits of running ENS in a Nested environment.

With the help from my friend Frank Escaros-Buechsel, who actually works in our NFV group at VMware. Frank helped validate the instructions but he also provided some additional insights on why this could be useful in a lab setup for verifying configuration and behaviors when additional tuning maybe required. If you are NOT running NFV-based workloads, ENS is not something you need to configure when running NSX-T using Nested ESXi.

So what is ENS?  Enhanced Network Stack (ENS) also referred to as Enhanced Data Path is an NSX-T capability which was first introduced with NSX-T 2.3. ENS is specifically designed for Network Function Virtualization (NFV) workloads that require a high performance data path. Such workloads include Telco, 5G and IoT based deployments where improved packet throughput is critical for the responsiveness of these applications.

[Read more...]

Customizing vCenter Alarm Email Subject and Body

by // 15 Comments

One of the automated actions that can be configured when a vCenter Server Alarm is triggered is to send an email notification. Over the years, I have seen a number of requests and questions about customizing the email and whether an email template exists. I personally have not used this feature much which has been around since the introduction of vCenter Server and mainly because I have always worked in an environment where we had dedicated monitoring tools that provide notifications including emails.

Most recently, I noticed an increase number of questions around this topic and I was curious on whether a solution exists today or if this is still a gap today? A quick Google search landed me on this 2013 VMTN thread which included several workarounds that customers have found. However, the only viable "supported" and "persisted" option at the time within that thread was to use the vSphere API/PowerCLI to customize the alarm action.

While going through this exercise myself, I found that our vSphere UI has had some enhancements since that 2013 thread and I thought it was worth sharing an update in 2019 on how customers can customize both the email subject and body for vCenter Alarms. One thing to note is that there is no generic email template that can be edited, the email customizations are applied on a per-Alarm action basis and this is applicable for both vCenter Server running in a traditional on-premises environment as well as for VMware Cloud on AWS or Dell EMC.

[Read more...]

How to debug NSX-T API Automation with PowerCLI?

by // 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.

[Read more...]