quicknote on Why did IT fail

Quicknote - Finding state information in the NSX-T Policy API

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A collegue approached me with a customer request that concerned the NSX-T APIs. More specifically the customer is already using the NSX-T API in management mode but didn’t find the equivalent in the policy API. Doing my own research, I also failed to find the API right away. This post is basicially a reminder to check on the “realized” state and get the head around the desired state of the NSX-T policy API.

TKGS failing to authenticate with the NSX ALB (AVI)

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

While rebuilding my lab from scratch with vSphere 7.0 U3c NSX Advanced (AVI) Load Balancer 21.1.3 I hit a situation where my TKGS installation would not continue with an error, it was stuck for hours: The control plane VM was unable to authenticate to the load balancer (Avi - https://:443/api/cluster) with the username '' and the supplied password. Validate the Supervisor cluster load balancer's authentication configuration. To make a long story short, while user, password and connectivity check out it looks like the AVI defaults changed along the way.

VMware Workstation - vctl unable to start

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Many thanks to Darius Davis from our engineering team who set me up on the solution. This morning I “just wanted to spin up a container quickly”. Having a recent version of VMware workstation already on my computer, using vctl was my preferred choice (In case you missed the blog). Problem My initial plans came to a halt as very attempt of a vctl system config or vctl system start threw an error:

LogInsight not receiving host data via cfapi

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On a recent, fresh installation of LogInsight I observed that no data from a set of hosts was coming into the LogInsight server. Debugging showed not issues related to the usual suspects of DNS, NTP, firewall or network which left me a bit puzzled. I found the answer by going through the logs of the loginsight agent (usually in /var/log/loginsight-agent/liagent_): 2021-07-20 07:08:22.319018 0x00007ff1c1a74700 DataController:167 | Creating cfapi transport 2021-07-20 07:08:22.

Tagging the vCenter (object)

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am working on enhancing my vSphere release tagging script with the ability to tag the vCenter with a human-readable release name. As shown in the screenshot, it’s easy enough in the UI. Tags applied to the vCenter in the UI However, in PowerCLI there is no commandlet like get-vcenter. After many tries I gave up trying to force the object returned from $global:DefaultVIServers[0] to accept any tag-related operations. Today, I had the idea of working backwards from the assigned tags with Get-TagAssignment

VMware Workstation - Updates to v15 and later breaks Minikube

Sat, 21 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Update from 2020-01-11 below Life was good when I was playing around with Minikube on my private Windows Notebook until I had the (stupid) idea to use choco to update everything to the latest version. Now, Minikube would not start and notably these two packages were updated: VMware Workstation 15 Pro: 15.5.1 build-15018445 minikube version: v1.6.1 The docker driver for VMware (docker-machine-vmware) hadn’t changed. Problem The error suggested that “vmrun” isn’t installed:

Route-based IKEv2 site-to-site VPN between Azure and an NSX-v ESG

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick drop of notes on how to configure this if anyone else needs it. You probably searched the net and found tons of howtos on policy-based VPNs. However, I needed to do a route-based VPN my Azure resources with multi-devices and you can have only a single VPN-policy on a Gateway. Infos on IPSEC settings where taken from the Azure documentation - please make sure you read the fields marked important.