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How to automate the creation multiple routable VLANs on single L2 network using VyOS

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My personal homelab has a very simple network topology, everything is connected to a single flat network. This has served me well over the years, but sometimes it can prevent me from deploying more complex scenarios. Most recently while working with NSX-T and Project Pacific, I had a need for additional VLANs which my home router does not support. There are a number of software solutions that can be used including the popular pfSense, which I have used before.

Over the Winter break, a colleague introduced me to VyOS, which is another popular software firewall and router solution. I had not heard of VyOS before but later realized it was derived from Vyatta, which I had heard of, but development of that solution had stopped and VyOS is now the open source version of that software. Having never played with VyoS before, I thought this might be a good learning opopournity and started to dabble with VyOS over the holiday. At a high level, I have VyOS connected to two networks: Outside network as VyOS refers which is your local LAN and Inside network as VyOS refers which is an is an isolated vSphere Portgroup (VSS/VDS) that is not connected to anything and configured to pass all traffic (4095). From here, you can create multiple VLANs in VyOS which can then be untagged using Virtual Guest Tagging (VGT) by placing a Nested ESXi VM on the same isolated portgroup and then creating the respective portgroups within the Nested ESXi VM mapping to the VyOS VLANs you have created.

One of the nice benefits of this solution is that you can create multiple "Isolated" yet routable networks that can still reach your primary LAN network and still have  to access core infrastructure services running like Active Directory, DNS, etc. which was one of my requirements.  After figuring out how VyOS works and applying that to my specific use case, I thought why not build some basic automation to setup this solution as I probably will forget how I setup everything. Initially I was using the VyOS OVA but later found out it was an extremely out of date there was no public version of the latest VyOS release in OVA form. I decided to use their latest rolling release and apply some vSphere API Automation to not only install VyOS but also fully configure based on template containing VyOS commands. I know the latest version of VyOS now includes a REST API but its a bit of a chicken/egg to enable and not very friendly to use compared to the solution I have built.

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Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment 

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While working on my Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blog series awhile back, one of the things I was also working on was some automation to help build out the required infrastructure NSX-T (Manager, Controller & Edge), Nested ESXi hosts configured with VSAN for the Compute vSphere Cluster and Pivotal Ops Manager. This was not only useful for my own learning purposes, but that I could easily rebuild my lab if I had messed something up and allowed me to focus more on the PKS solution rather than standing up the infrastructure itself.

To be honest, I had about 95% of the script done but I was not able to figure out one of the NSX-T APIs and I got busy and had left the script on the back burner. This past weekend while cleaning out some of my PKS research documents, I came across the script and funny enough, in about 30minutes I was able to solve the problem which I was stuck for weeks prior. I just finished putting the final touches on the script along with adding some documentation. Simliar to my other vGhetto Lab Automation scripts, I have created a Github repo vGhetto Automated PKS Lab Deployment

UPDATE (06/19/18) - I have just updated the script to also include the deployment and configuration of the PKS components (Ops Manager, BOSH Director, Harbor & Stemcell). The script by default will now configure everything end-2-end and you will have a fully functional PKS environment that you can start playing around with. For complete details, please see the Github repo which has the updated requirements and documentation. Below is a screenshot of the PKS deployment and configuration which requires the use of the Ops Manager CLI (OM).


The script will deploy the following components which will be placed inside of a vApp as shown in the screenshot below:

  • NSX-T Manager
  • NSX-T Controller x 3 (though you technically only need one for lab/poc purposes)
  • NSX-T Edge
  • Nested ESXi VMs x 3 (VSAN will be configured)
  • Ops Manager


The script follows my PKS blog series and automates Part 3 (NSX-T) and the start of Part 4 (Ops Manager deploy), please refer to these individual blog posts for more information. The goal of the script is to enable folks to jump right into the PKS configuration workflows and not have to worry about setting up the actual infrastructure that is needed for PKS. Once the script has finished, you can jump right into Ops Manager and start your PKS journey.

Here is a sample execution of the script which took ~29 minutes to complete.


The full requirements for using the script be found on the Github repo and below are the software versions that I had used to deploy and configure PKS: