Using BGP with VMware Enterprise PKS and NSX-T

I recently started investing some time into the ”cool kid stuff’; VMware Enterprise PKS, and Kubernetes. I started with reading some blogs, watching some video’s online and reading official documentation. After a while, I started deploying PKS in my lab and tried to integrate it with NSX-T. The blogs I was using were not talking about dynamic routing at all, only doing static routes. Even the Pivotal documentation set is not mentioning BGP setup in that much detail. Only for the Multi-Tenant PKS deployments. I’m not talking about other dynamic routing protocols because NSX-T only supports BGP.

Most of the times customers who are deploying PKS or considering PKS are running dynamic routing protocols in their environments. Therefore, I’m writing this blog to share how I did my BGP setup within NSX-T and PKS, and then specifically for the route redistribution part. (more…)

Physical IP and DNS mapping with vRealize Network Insight

vRealize Network Insight is the must-have tool to gain visibility into all your network flows in your infrastructure. When adding vCenter Servers as data sources in vRNI it can map VM names and IP addresses. As in almost every environment, there are running physical workloads as well. Those names are not being recognized or mapped by vRNI and show only the IP address in the flows.

For every human being, except for the hard-core networking guys 😉 it is easier to view flows by hostnames instead of IP addresses. Therefore, vRNI provide you the possibility to map A records to IP addresses. In this blog post, I will explain how to do this with the help of a PowerShell script. (more…)

My first lightboard video! #RunvRNI

I recently did a recording of my first lightboard session. With vRealize Network Insight as a topic. Why? Because in my opinion vRNI is one of the products from the VMware portfolio which is not widely known in the market. And that’s a pity, because this tooling is so d*mn powerful, that every network engineer would like to have this in their own environment.

And it went finally online today! Please have a look! If you have any questions or remarks let me know!

Watch this “lightboard” video led by Wesley Geelhoed, Virtualization Consultant @ ITQ, who explains what VMware vRealize Network Insight is.

Add multiple static routes to all your NSX-v edges

When you have NSX running on a vSAN stretched cluster over two datacenters, or a Cross vCenter NSX setup over multiple datacenters you probably need static routes for the networks behind the DLR to keep the routing tables alive on the physical network routers when a datacenter failover occurs. I am working at a customer where I needed to add 10 static routes to 20 different ESG’s. It’s obvious that I didn’t want to add them manually. Therefore I created a script to put in the static routes in the edges for me. This may come in handy for somebody else.

Requirements:
– Powershell (5.1)
– PowerCLI
– PowerNSX

(more…)