Eric Sloof

This document provides guidance and best practices for designing environments that leverage the capabilities of VMware NSX-T. It is targeted at virtualization and network architects interested in deploying NSX Data Center solutions.

This document is organized into several chapters. Chapter 2 to 6 explain the architectural building blocks of NSX-T as a full stack solution, providing a detail functioning of NSX-T components, features and scope.  They also describe components and functionality utilized for security use cases. These chapters lay the groundwork to help understand and implement the design guidance described in the design chapter.

The design chapter (Chapter 7) examines detailed use cases of network virtualization and recommendations of either best practices or leading practices based on the type of use case or design form factor. It offers guidance for a variety of factors including physical infrastructure considerations, compute node requirements, and variably sized environments from small to enterprise scale.

This version of design guide VMware has updated the chapter on performance. This chapter was introduced by a popular request from their loyal customer base in version 2.0 of this document and aims at clarifying the myths vs facts on NSX-T based SDN.

In this article I’ll try to explain how you can use the ESXi host state or vCenter Custom Attributes to automate the vRealize Operations object maintenance mode.

When working in a vSphere environment, you often have to patch or upgrade systems. If this environment is monitored by vRealize Operations, you want to avoid false positive alerts.

Putting a host in maintenance manually can be done from the Administration menu by choosing Inventory and browse through the object types looking for Hosts Systems. After selecting the correct host, you can put the host in maintenance mode.

Selecting objects in the Inventory explorer is not always very user friendly. If you don’t see any object because of multiple selections, “Deselect All” is often the only way to get your full list back.

So, let’s take a look at how to automate these tasks. In the first scenario we will use the maintenance state of a host in vCenter. This state can be used as a membership criterion in a custom group. This custom group can be configured with a maintenance policy that’s tight to a schedule.

The first step we need to take is create a schedule. In the following example, I’ve created a schedule with the name “Always”. This schedule is configured with a date in the past and a date in the far future. This is much easier to configure in a policy compared to blocking all the alerts individually.  

So now let’s create a Maintenance Policy. In the “Analysis Settings” I’ve selected “Always” as the Maintenance Schedule. This policy will be used by the Custom Group.

The Custom Group’s membership is based on the Property “Runtime|Maintenace State” with the value “inMaintenance”. You also need to select the option “Keep group membership up to date”.

Once the Schedule, the Policy and the Custom Group have been configured we can switch to vCenter and put two of the ESXi hosts in maintenance mode.

After putting the two hosts in Maintenance, we can go back to the vRealize Operations Inventory explorer and check the Collection State of both hosts.

We can see that sa-esxi-01 and sa-esxi-08 have entered the “In Maintenance” State. There’s also a virtual machine in this list. Typically, there’s no option available in vCenter that allows you to put a virtual machine in maintenance mode.

In the next section we will look at putting other vCenter inventory items like datastores or switches in maintenance mode by using the vCenter Custom Attributes.

In this example we will look at how to put the app-01 virtual machine in maintenance. The first thing you need to do is create a Custom Attribute named Maintenance second, we have to assign “yes” as a value.

The next step is the creation of a new policy or edit the exiting Maintenance policy and include the “vCenter Adaptor - Virtual Machine” Object type.

Now we have to create a new Custom Group with a membership rule that checks the “Summary|Custom Tag:Maintenance” property value. When this value is “yes” the virtual machine will automatically become a member.

In the Inventory we can see the Virtual Machine app-01 has stopped collecting metrics. The collection Sate is showing 3 grey icons. The attribute-based maintenance detection is not limited to virtual machines only, it’s also possible with other vCenter inventory objects and also works on an ESXi host.

Operations and visibility are key metrics that enterprise assess the risk and success of their business- critical applications. NSX-T is a software defined network platform when deployed touches every aspect of enterprise connectivity and thus understanding, leverage and building successful operational design and best practices can define a difference between a successful and a failed environment.

NSX-T provides several tools and utilities to simplify daily operations and provide the level of visibility an enterprise-grade SDN solution requires. They can be classified into three main categories:

• Visibility -Tools provides information about the health and status of the NSX components, traffic statistics or visibility of the different systems connected to NSX
• Operations - Tools and utilities focused on simplifying installation and other common tasks like upgrading the system, backup/restore or getting the corresponding support bundles
• Troubleshooting - Tools help finding out problems or configuration issues when something does not work

NSX-T also works with other VMware and 3rd party operational tools. For example, vRealize Network Insight(vRNI) which is a comprehensive operational tool for the entire SDDC environment. This guide outlines how to utilize vRNI to monitor and troubleshoot NSX deployment. This guide also outlines vRealize Log Insight(vRLI) Content Pack which was developed for NSX- T.

This primer on NSX-T helps you understand the capabilities and features of NSX-T, how to configure and manage NSX-T, and integrate NSX-T with other software. The book is the first in a series that will teach you the basics of NSX-T, which is an update of VMware's original software-defined networking (SDN) architecture aimed at making networks agile and flexible.

You will become familiar with VMware's software-defined data center (SDDC) ecosystem and how NSX-T fits in. You will understand NSX-T components such as NSX-T Manager, NSX-T Edge Transport Nodes, and NSX-T Host Transport Nodes. And you will learn how to install and configure network services such as East/West and North/South routing capabilities, layer two switching, VRF, EVPN, multicast, and layer two bridging.

The book provides best practices on how to configure routing and switching features, and teaches you how to get the required visibility of not only your NSX-T platform but also your NSX-T-enabled network infrastructure.  

The book explains security, advanced network features, and multi-site capabilities and demonstrates how network and security services can be offered across multiple on-premise locations with a single pane of glass for networking and security policy management. The interface with public cloud services is discussed and the book explains NSX-T operation in an on-premise private cloud and positioning and integrating NSX-T on a public cloud (off premises).

What You Will Learn 

• Understand how NSX-T fits in the VMware SDDC ecosystem
• Know what NSX-T is, its components, and the terminology used
• Install NSX-T
• Configure NSX-T network services
• Manage the NSX-T network

Getting Started with NSX-T: Logical Routing and Switching - The Basic Principles of Building Software-Defined Network Architectures with VMware NSX-T