vMotion of NSX EDGE gotcha

Hi,

Recently I was working on a brown field deployment of NSX and ran into an issue where we were not able to connect to the DHCP server from a Logical Switch (which means the VMs are not getting IP addresses from DHCP server) which was a key.

If we put the VM on a regular VDS dvportgroup it gets the DHCP IP correctly.

So we started looking in to the issue further and engage VMware GSS to look in to the issue.

During the troubleshooting we had to decide the location of Edge and try moving it to a different host to verify if its not hitting any uplink issue.

As we were using vCenter Web Client and as soon as we tried migrating (vMotion) it to another host and we were prompted with the NIC mapping page. Where we need to map each interface exists on the NSX Edge to a corresponding portgroup or dvportgroup. Now we have only limited number of portgroups/dvportgroups existed on the Cluster and we could not map all the internal interfaces (which gets created by default on the Edge appliance).

The source were listed as "None" so not sure where to map them.

So we ended up using the vSphere client to migrate the Edge appliance, and boom....it got migrated with no notification about mapping all the interfaces. Just select the destination ESXi host and hit "Finish", and we are done.

We were then moved into the next phase of troubleshooting but the above just put me in a dilemma that the behaviour of Web Client is a bug or is it by design.

Interested in getting the answer from VMware so that I can clarify that with the existing and future customers on why to use vSphere client and what is the alternate methods to use when the Fat/Thick client will completely got removed by VMware??

Please leave the comment and share this.

Thanks for your time.

New VMware NSX Licensing Scheme is released

Hi all,

VMware just announced the new NSX Licensing scheme so please read the FAQ here which has all the preliminary information without even getting panicked and also get in touch with your sales person (assigned to your account) which will give you the better idea.

So by looking at this the most suitable one for any small to mid size organization is the "Advanced" version which has mostly all the bells and whistles except the multi site and Cross VC functionalities.

Its a simple math when making the decisions on what the organization wants. If its ready to spend money to connect their geographically dispersed locations then Enterprise edition is the only choice.

To promote open stack the standard Edition is having the support for it. Home Lab people might have to go for the Standard Edition depending on the price of it as I'm sure it wont be affordable to choose the Advanced or Enterprise version.

IPSEC and SSL VPN  are part of Enterprise which is rising a question on just using L2VPN when normal organization have staff people who are connecting remotely using their MAC/WIN/*NIX machines. So even for that feature they need to go for Enterprise version. Hoping that this should be part of Advanced and NOT Enterprise but lets see what the future might hold.

All the remote features are part of Enterprise which is nice as if you don't need it you don't buy them.

There is no indication on pricing done as the pointer was set to contact the Sales person but even a hint should be fine on the pricing model or even if one has to use just one feature from other edition then what is the cost involved in that (rather than switching from one edition to another completely).

Home Lab people will surely need most of the features to test and try out various scenarios but not sure what will happen in that area unless the person is a vExpert, then its a different story.

This granular model looks adaptive but the pricing model will tell us more on how people feel about it. I just heard that it will be based on 1K per socket but I would not go with it unless it come from a valid source or from VMware itself. So hoping something should be publicly available which will give an idea to the large audience.

Share and care !

Thanks for your time.