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Removable M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe enclosure by Icy Dock

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My homelab is a constant experiment and hardware components are moved around for various testing, especially when it comes to networking and storage. When needing to move around an M.2 NVMe SSD, complexity of taking apart a system will vary on the platform but generally it is inconvenience. When I came to learn that Icy Dock, a manufacturer of storage enclosures, will be releasing a removable M.2 NVMe SSD tray that is connected to PCIe expansion slot, I knew I had to get my hands on it.


The good folks over at Icy Dock were kind enough to send me an early evaluational unit of the upcoming MB840M2P-B which is now available for $69. will be released in August and should retail for around $80 USD (final prices are still TBD). The use case above may not apply to most folks and is probably unique to my specific hardware usage but I think this is still a very interesting solution that is still useful to be aware of if you are your own homelab whitebox and have a spare PCIe slot. Icy Dock also produces many other types of storage enclosures that you might find interesting based your own needs.

For my setup, I installed the MB840M2P-B into my Intel NUC 9 Pro, which is definitely not easy to take apart. This is especially true for the two M.2 which is attached to the NUC Element but even more painful to get to the 3rd M.2 which is located under the baseboard. For my specific use case, this was well worth using up one of the PCIe slots on the NUC 9 Pro! This enclosure can also be added to the new 2019 Mac Pro which is another platform that Icy Dock sees benefiting from this solution.

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Using the new installation method for deploying OpenShift 4.5 on VMware Cloud on AWS

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I recently saw a tweet from Jason Shiplett who works over on the VMware Validated Design (VVD) team (also my former team before joining VMware Cloud) who shared a new validated design for running Redhat OpenShift 4.3 on VMware Cloud Foundation. Funny enough, a couple of days ago I was just researching into deploying OpenShift running on VMware Cloud on AWS from a customer inquiry.

Timing could not have been better as RedHat just announced their OpenShift 4.5 release a few days ago as and one of the major updates is support for vSphere using their full stack automation also known as te Installer Provisioned Infrastructure (IPI) option. Previous to this, customers who wanted to deploy OpenShift on vSphere had to use the User Provisioned Infrastructure (UPI) method, which the VVD design also uses, which is much lengthier and complex when compared to the native IPI method.

For someone who has never worked with OpenShift before, this was great news and I get to try out this new deployment method on an VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure 🙂

Pre-Requisites:

Step 1 - You will need a Linux system to perform the installation and it should have access to the vCenter Server running in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). In my example, I am using an Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM which is also running in the SDDC and has outbound internet connectivity.

Step 2 - Login to VMware Cloud on AWS console and create a new NSX-T network segment that is DHCP enabled. In my example, I named it openshift-network with a 192.168.3.0/24 configuration.


Step 3 - Navigate to Inventory->Groups and create the following groups and replace the CIDR networks with that of your SDDC:

Group Name IP Address Members
Compute OpenShift Network 192.168.3.0/24
Compute SDDC Management Network 10.2.0.0/16
Management OpenShift Network 192.168.3.0/24

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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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