How Does Internet Work

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.

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.

It’s one of those articles aimed at the people with Cisco ACI experience who don’t bother with reading all the install and other guides again while going through n’th time of building and ACI fabric, like me. When it comes to Cisco ACI, you really should.

There’s a small change with the physical build of the third generation of APIC server where 10G SFP interfaces from APIC towards the Leaf switches (used for fabric discovery and later for the in-band controller to fabric communication) where 4x10G card is built in the server and not like 2x10G on M2/L2 and other first and second generation of APICs.

When you see those 4x10G ports on the server, the logical thing to do will be to use the first two ports on each APIC and connect them to two Leafs (for redundancy and stuff). It ended up being that is not really how Cisco intended those interfaces to be used and it will end up blowing your fabric stability and management. I was able to discover the fabric and register the fabric leaf and spines. It was even possible to configure the whole thing up to the functional fabric and L2-L3 functions but the APIC cluster was always unstable and going in and out of configuration stale and data diverged statuses on cluster view.

SDDC – Software-Defined Data Centers

Times of Software Defined everything has long since arrived, the need to implement many appliances, two or more for each network function, is not so popular anymore. The possibility to manage packet forwarding, load balancing and security of network traffic inside the datacenter from one simple web console is showing finally that things can be managed in a simpler way after all. All vendors in the networking world tried to come up with their own way of centralizing data center management, as it ends up, all of them did it, some better than the others. As always, it’s not a surprise that some vendors are better in creating hardware-based forwarding solutions and some others in software solutions (in this case, software for packet forwarding).

Requirements

It seems that we have basically only a few good options when wanting to select a complete SDDC solution. The data center needs to provide a large number of server access ports in the form of networking devices that are configured and managed as simply and promptly as possible. Datacenter network needs to be configured in a way to provide robustness and stability of packet forwarding at almost line rate and all that at 10-100, even 400Gbps speeds.

I made it to the list of Cisco Champions for 2020 which is now the third year in a row!

The primary reason I could again be selected between the first 100 Cisco champs for 2020 in the early acceptance process is the stuff that I shared through this blog and because of the contact with people that got to me directly via my blog comments or e-mail.

Again, 2019 was another year full of great projects and big challenges with new technologies. We finally break the barrier of NFV and Automation and got some great stuff done using automation within software-defined data center solutions both with Cisco and other vendors.

Having this badge is cool, but connections and sharing with the networking community is something that’s even better and it makes me create more material and share it here soon.

This year will be a blast, again!

This blog was selected as a finalist in Cisco BLOG Awards in the Best Analysis category, the category for resources that provide insightful discussions and help for networking architects around the world.

Fancy right? Do you agree? Go and vote, hit the big green button it’s the second one on the list 😉

https://www.ciscofeedback.vovici.com/se/705E3ECD18791A68

API Calls method

The fancy way of configuring Cisco ACI Fabric is by using Python script for generating API calls. Those API calls are then used to configure Cisco ACI by pushing those calls to APIC controller using POSTMAN (or similar tool). Configuration changes done this way are those that you are doing often and without much chance of making mistakes.

You write a Python script and that script will take your configuration variables and generate API call that will configure the system quickly and correctly every time.

The thing is that you need to take the API call example and use Python to write a script that will recreate that API calls with your variables of configuration and do that correctly. You need to know to code in Python and you will need a certain amount of time to write that script.

POST JSON file method