Author: Valter Popeskic

This article describes the strange workaround of switching VMware NSX-T enabled cluster from using vSphere Enterprise Plus license to vSphere Standard license with vDS licensed through NSX-T. I really hope that you will not need to go through this as it is quite like bringing the whole environment up from scratch. But if you have two clusters with enough resources it will enable you to do it without downtime.

Environment on which this was tested is vSphere 7.0.2 and NSX-T 3.1.2

NSX-T as a network and security platform enables network functions to be virtualised on your vSphere cluster. The way it does this is to implement additional features of network traffic steering and packaging inside its vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS).

Before NSX-T 3.1.1 the only way to get your cluster equipped with vDS was to have a vSphere Enterprise Plus license. From NSX-T 3.1.1 version onwards, VMware gives you the possibility to use vDS without vSphere Enterprise Plus license and license it using NSX-T license. This enabled users with a standard vSphere license to be able to deploy NSX-T on all editions of vCenter Server and vSphere.

After this started to be possible there were some customers who realised that in some cases the only reason they have vSphere Enterprise Plus license for a specific cluster is to be able to use NSX-T since that was needed in the past. So they decided that they will transfer those Enterprise Plus licenses to some other (new) cluster that needs those licenses for more different features.

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Doing a lot on Nexus 9000 series datacenter boxes (N9K) lately? Sure you’re missing the good old ‘wr’ command to save your last startup-config into running-config.

NXOS architecture guys decided that you should be really well concentrated when deciding to save your nice new configuration to survive device reboot and type: N9K_1(config)# copy running-config startup-config. Just typing ‘wr’ into the console would be too nice right? Let’s use the alias configuration and bring that command back to the box.

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Intro

It’s a shortlist of things that you should probably know when installing VMware NSX-T. Of course, installing NSX-T should be done by following the official documentation. This here is just a few additional points that could help. It’s for your peace of mind afterward.

This is an article from the VMware from Scratch series

NSX Manager is a Cluster of three VMs

You should end up having three NSX-Manager VMs in a cluster when you finish NSX-T installation. The first one will be deployed via .ovf file from vCenter, the other two direct from first NSX Manager GUI as soon as you connect it to vCenter (aka. adding the Fabric -> Compute Manager)

NSX Manager VMs should not run on the same ESXi host

Use vCenter datacenter configuration VM/host rules (affinity rules) to automatically keep manager VMs running on different hosts on the VMware environment. It’s about the host failing and you still having most of the managers running.

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This is an article from the VMware from Scratch series

During the process of preparation to Install Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition (TKGI v1.8) on vSphere with NSX-T Data Center (v3.0.2) one of the steps is to use Ops Manager to deploy Harbor Container Registry (in this case v2.1.0).

The process of deployment ended with Harbor error several times so I’m sharing here my solution in order to ease things out for you giving the fact that I didn’t come across any solution googling around.

Image from VMware website https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tanzu-Kubernetes-Grid-Integrated-Edition/index.html

In the process, the Harbor Registry product tile is downloaded from the VMware Tanzu network portal, imported in the Ops Manager installation dashboard, and selected to be configured and prepared for deployment into the VMware environment.

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