NSX-T – Page 4

Customizing the NSX-T Login UI

10.29.2019 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I have been doing some automation with NSX-T 2.5 lately and for troubleshooting and validation purposes, I obviously make use of the NSX-T UI. After each new deployment I need to login to verify a few things. Out of pure laziness, I really would like to be able to login with just a single click for development purposes. I certainly could use password manager but it would still be a couple of clicks but I was looking something slightly quicker and that could easily work in a number of environments that I have.

Looking around the filesystem of the NSX Unified Appliance, I found the structure for the login UI to be fairly similiar (thanks to VMware Clarity) to that of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I found that I could apply the same techniques I had used to customize the VCSA Login UI including setting up pre-filled credentials (no recommended for obvious reasons) on the NSX-T Appliance.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk. Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore back the system defaults.

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How to debug NSX-T API Automation with PowerCLI?

10.25.2019 by William Lam // 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.

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Connecting to NSX-T Policy API using NSX-T Private IP in VMC

05.30.2019 by William Lam // 3 Comments

As explained in my Getting started with NSX-T Policy API in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) article, there are two ways in which you can interact with the NSX-T Policy API in VMC. The initial method is with the NSX-T Reverse Proxy which designed for initial setup including Edge Firewall and connectivity configuration (VPN/Direct Connect). Once you have enabled remote access from your network to the SDDC, you can continue using the reverse proxy method or you can connect directly to the NSX-T Manager via its private IP Address.

So how do you actually connect to the NSX-T Manager using its private IP? To be honest, this was not something I had to do before as I really like the simplicity of the reverse proxy but since this came up today in one of our VMC Slack channels, I figured I take a closer look.

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