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VPN Configuration to VMware Cloud on AWS using pfSense

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Provisioning a new SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) is not an operation that I perform on a regular basis. Usually, one of the first tasks after a new SDDC deployment is setting up a VPN connection between your on-premises datacenter and your VMC environment. Given this is not a frequent activity, I always forget the specific configurations required for my particular VPN solution and figure I would document this for myself in the future as well as anyone else who might also have a simliar setup.

Since the VMC Gateways are just NSX-v Edges, any VPN solution that supports the NSX-v configurations will also work with VMC. In my environment, I am using pfSense which is a popular and free security Virtual Appliance that many folks run in their VMware home lab. Before getting started, it is also important to note that there are two gateway endpoints that you can setup separate VPN connections to. The first is the Management Gateway which provides access to the management infrastructure such vCenter Server, NSX and ESXi hosts and the second is the Compute Gateway which provide access to the VM workloads running within VMC. Since the instructions are exactly the same for setting up the VPN for either gateways, I am just going over the Management Gateway configuration and where applicable, I will note the minor differences.

Step 1 - Login to the VMC Portal (vmc.vmware.com) and select one of your deployed SDDCs. Click on the Network tab and you should be taken to a page like the one shown in the screenshot below. Here is where you will be applying your VPN configuration from the VMC side. Start off by making a note of the public IP Address for the Management Gateway (highlighted in yellow), this will needed when configuring the VPN configuration on the on-prem side. It is probably a good idea to also note down the Compute Gateway IP Address if you plan on configuring that as well.


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ESXi Learnswitch – Enhancement to the ESXi MAC Learn DvFilter

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The ESXi MAC Learn dvFilter Fling was released a little over two years ago and it has become a must have when it comes to running our ESXi Hypervisor within a VM, also referred to as Nested ESXi. The reason this Fling has become such a popular hit amongst our customers and partners is that it greatly improves the performance when “Promiscuous Mode” is enabled on a Virtual or Distributed Virtual Portgroup, which is a requirement for using Nested ESXi. Although this Fling works great, there are a couple of limitations with this solution today. The first of which is called out in the original Fling release notes, that once a MAC Address has been learned, it never ages out which is not ideal for long running Nested ESXi environments that generates a large amount of new MAC Addresses. The second, is the lack of vMotion support where the learned MAC Address table is not transfered to the destination ESXi host and must be re-learned.

To help address both of these limitations, the folks over in the Network and Security Business Unit (NSBU) have been working hard to improve upon the existing solution and have developed a new native MAC Learning VMkernel module called the Learnswitch. This new Learnswitch not only helps improves Nested ESXi workloads but it can also potentially benefit other workloads such as Nested Containers or other 3rd Party network inspection software. One immediate difference from the previous MAC Learn dvFilter solution is that rather than operating on the Network IO Chain, the filtering is now performed within the outer virtual switch layer itself which will provide some additional performance gains. The other added benefit from an internal VMware standpoint is that the Learnswitch is now vmkapi compatible, which means we will have a better backwards compatible story for supporting old releases of ESXi. One downside to this new solution compared to the previous one is that because the dvFilter operated below the virtual switch layer, it could support both a Virtual Standard Switch as well as the Distributed Virtual Switch. With the new Learnswitch, a Distributed Virtual Switch will be required. If you currently do not meet the requirements of the new Learnswitch, you can continue using the dvFilter, but it is recommended that you do not mix both on a single system but you can definitely make use of both solutions across different ESXi hosts depending on the constraints of your environment.

Here are some of the new capabilities provided by the new Learnswitch module:

  • Overlay Network based that learning and filtering are done in Etherswitch forwarding check
  • MAC Address learning is based on VLAN ID or VXLAN ID on uplink and leaf port
  • Packet is filtered on uplink and leaf port if the MAC is learned on a different port
  • MAC Address table size is 32k per system
  • MAC Address aging support with default aging time of 5 minutes and configurable
  • Unknown unicast packet is flooded by default and configurable to drop
  • vMotion support that the MAC table learned on the port is transferred to destination host and RARP packet is sent
  • Standalone VMkernel module available as a VIB
  • net-learnswitch CLI to display MAC Address table, configuration and stats

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Potential ESXi Host Preparation issues with NSX 6.3

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While working on updating my vGhetto Automated vSphere Lab Deployment script to add support for NSX 6.3 with vSphere 6.5, I ran into an issue with the Host Preparation step. Although the resolution turned out to be quite simple, it was very difficult to diagnose the problem. I suspect this scenario could easily be encountered by others, so I wanted to make folks aware of what I ran into. There is also another potential gotcha for host preparation that I did not encounter myself, but it was brought to my attention that I thought was also worth sharing as well.

Scenario 1 - Attempted Host Preparation and all "Install agent" tasks fails with "Cannot complete the operation. See the event log for details" and below is a screenshot of the error. There was nothing useful when looking at the event logs for either NSX or ESXi using the vSphere Web Client.


There was also nothing useful in the ESXi log /var/log/esxupdate.log that gave insights to why the NSX VIBs failed to install:

2017-02-16T12:38:53Z esxupdate: 73899: Transaction: DEBUG: Populating VIB list from all VIBs in metadata https://vcenter65-1.primp-industries.com:443/eam/vib?id=d4917629-51d1-4da9-82d6-8da54815447d; depots:
2017-02-16T12:38:54Z esxupdate: 73899: downloader: DEBUG: Downloading https://vcenter65-1.primp-industries.com:443/eam/vib?id=d4917629-51d1-4da9-82d6-8da54815447d to /tmp/tmpdfcbr23q...
2017-02-16T12:38:54Z esxupdate: 73899: Metadata.pyc: INFO: Unrecognized file vendor-index.xml in Metadata file
2017-02-16T12:38:54Z esxupdate: 73899: imageprofile: INFO: Adding VIB VMware_locker_tools-light_6.5.0-0.0.4564106 to ImageProfile (Updated) ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-standard
2017-02-16T12:38:54Z esxupdate: 73899: imageprofile: INFO: Adding VIB VMware_bootbank_esx-vsip_6.5.0-0.0.4987428 to ImageProfile (Updated) ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-standard
2017-02-16T12:38:54Z esxupdate: 73899: imageprofile: INFO: Adding VIB VMware_bootbank_esx-vxlan_6.5.0-0.0.4987428 to ImageProfile (Updated) ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-standard
2017-02-16T12:38:54Z esxupdate: 73899: vmware.runcommand: INFO: runcommand called with: args = '['/bin/localcli', 'system', 'maintenanceMode', 'get']', outfile = 'None', returnoutput = 'True', timeout = '0.0'.
2017-02-16T12:38:54Z esxupdate: 73899: HostInfo: INFO: localcli system returned status (0) Output: Disabled Error:

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