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.

vCenter Certificate Automation Tool 1.0

Recently with the introduction of SSO people find it difficult to manage SSL certificates with various VMware products. So based on the issues and other facts VMware has released today a new tool called "vCenter Certification Automation Tool version 1.0" which will help implementation of Custom certificates which can be mainly categorized in the following category

1. Secure token Service Certificate – Certificate used by vCenter Single Sign On (SSO) for encryption tokens
2. Solution User Certificates – Certificates used by each solution to identify themselves as users to SSO
3. SSL Certificates  – certificates needed for SSL communication for the UI and API layer
4. Host Certificates – These certificates are deployed in each ESXi host and used for secure vCenter to ESXi communication.

This tool will help configuring the SSL certificates for the following products

1. vCenter Server
2. vCenter Single Sign On
3. vCenter Inventory Service
4. vSphere Web Client
5. vCenter Log Browser
6. VMware Update Manager (VUM)
7. vCenter Orchestrator (VCO)

KB 2041600 is published which will discuss about the Tool in detail and you can find the blog post here.


You can download the Tool from here which will require you MyVMware Account credentials.

Hope you now have smooth experience while dealing with SSL certificates.

Lot of people are involved in developing this tool and Hats Off to all of them.

Please provide the feedback about the tool on the VMware blog post page.

Enjoy and share !!