William Lam

Enhancements to the community ne1000 VIB for Intel NUC 10

08/03/2020 by William Lam 14 Comments

As many of you know, the onboard Intel NIC (8086:0d4f) found in the 10th generation of the Intel NUC (Frost Canyon) is not automatically recognized by ESXi and requires an updated ne1000 VIB which was released earlier this year. An unfortunate side affect after patching or upgrading an ESXi host which contains this modified ne1000 VIB is that it will be replaced by a newer version of the VIB and causes the NIC to no longer be recognized again.

A quick workaround is to simply re-install the modified ne1000 VIB and network connectivity will be restored which is less than ideal. A new vSphere Image Profile can also be created that contains both the patch/upgrade you intend to apply along with the modified ne1000 VIB, ensuring that you remove the newer version which may not be ideal as well. In speaking with Songtao, a VMware Engineer who I worked with on the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi, about this issue and he came up with a very simple solution. Lets choose a different name for the VIB module which removes all the complexity mentioned above. This solution would allow for both drivers to coexists and more importantly, it is persistent across patching and upgrades of ESXi.

Integrating VMware Cloud Notification Gateway with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

07/29/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

I previously wrote about the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) which provides curated notifications delivered to VMware Cloud on AWS users. By default, NGW supports several types of notification channels such as email, VMware Cloud Console UI, VMware Cloud Activity Log, vRealize Log Intelligence Cloud (vRLIC) and the vSphere UI when using the vCenter Cloud Gateway. A lesser known feature of NGW is the ability to extend into even more channels by leveraging its webhook functionality which is available when using NGW API.

For a basic "pass through" of the NGW notification to another cloud service such as Slack or Microsoft Teams as example, you can simple setup an incoming webhook on Slack or Microsoft Teams, which I had covered in the previous blog post. From there, you can configure an NGW subscription and forward the NGW notification to the specified incoming webhook.

For more interesting scenarios where customers may want to perform some additional data processing when the NGW notification arrives or run some code/automation and integrate that with other systems which can include your on-premises infrastructure, the basic webhook workflow is not sufficient. Having said that, at the end of the previous blog post I did hint at a solution that would enable customers to support such scenarios which is by leveraging the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution.

The way this works is that we are still taking advantage of the NGW webhook capability but instead of forwarding the NGW notification to a cloud service that supports an incoming webhook, we are sending it to VEBA for processing. Once the notification has been received by VEBA, customers can apply additional logic by using any language of their choice which runs as an automated function and is then responsible for sending the final payload to its destination. This is really the power of VEBA which enables customers to perform any additional processing or business logic to an event before sending it out to its intended target.

Removable M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe enclosure by Icy Dock

07/27/2020 by William Lam 2 Comments

My homelab is a constant experiment and hardware components are moved around for various testing, especially when it comes to networking and storage. When needing to move around an M.2 NVMe SSD, complexity of taking apart a system will vary on the platform but generally it is inconvenience. When I came to learn that Icy Dock, a manufacturer of storage enclosures, will be releasing a removable M.2 NVMe SSD tray that is connected to PCIe expansion slot, I knew I had to get my hands on it.

The good folks over at Icy Dock were kind enough to send me an early evaluational unit of the upcoming MB840M2P-B which is now available for $69. ~~will be released in August and should retail for around $80 USD (final prices are still TBD)~~. The use case above may not apply to most folks and is probably unique to my specific hardware usage but I think this is still a very interesting solution that is still useful to be aware of if you are your own homelab whitebox and have a spare PCIe slot. Icy Dock also produces many other types of storage enclosures that you might find interesting based your own needs.

For my setup, I installed the MB840M2P-B into my Intel NUC 9 Pro, which is definitely not easy to take apart. This is especially true for the two M.2 which is attached to the NUC Element but even more painful to get to the 3rd M.2 which is located under the baseboard. For my specific use case, this was well worth using up one of the PCIe slots on the NUC 9 Pro! This enclosure can also be added to the new 2019 Mac Pro which is another platform that Icy Dock sees benefiting from this solution.

Using the new installation method for deploying OpenShift 4.5 on VMware Cloud on AWS

07/18/2020 by William Lam 1 Comment

I recently saw a tweet from Jason Shiplett who works over on the VMware Validated Design (VVD) team (also my former team before joining VMware Cloud) who shared a new validated design for running Redhat OpenShift 4.3 on VMware Cloud Foundation. Funny enough, a couple of days ago I was just researching into deploying OpenShift running on VMware Cloud on AWS from a customer inquiry.

Timing could not have been better as RedHat just announced their OpenShift 4.5 release a few days ago as and one of the major updates is support for vSphere using their full stack automation also known as te Installer Provisioned Infrastructure (IPI) option. Previous to this, customers who wanted to deploy OpenShift on vSphere had to use the User Provisioned Infrastructure (UPI) method, which the VVD design also uses, which is much lengthier and complex when compared to the native IPI method.

For someone who has never worked with OpenShift before, this was great news and I get to try out this new deployment method on an VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure 🙂

Pre-Requisites:

Step 1 - You will need a Linux system to perform the installation and it should have access to the vCenter Server running in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). In my example, I am using an Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM which is also running in the SDDC and has outbound internet connectivity.

Step 2 - Login to VMware Cloud on AWS console and create a new NSX-T network segment that is DHCP enabled. In my example, I named it openshift-network with a 192.168.3.0/24 configuration.

Step 3 - Navigate to Inventory->Groups and create the following groups and replace the CIDR networks with that of your SDDC:

Group	Name	IP Address Members
Compute	OpenShift Network	192.168.3.0/24
Compute	SDDC Management Network	10.2.0.0/16
Management	OpenShift Network	192.168.3.0/24

Retrieving network statistics on VMware Cloud on AWS using NSX-T Policy API

07/16/2020 by William Lam 1 Comment

One question that has come up lately from VMware Cloud on AWS customers is to understand their network traffic usage, especially as it pertains to traffic that exit or egress their SDDC. There are a number of graphical tools that can be used today to get insights into this information, one is the popular vRealize Network Insight Cloud solution which many of our VMware Cloud on AWS customers are taking advantage of to not only understand traffic usage and flow data history but is also instrumental in aiding customers when planning workload migrations from their on-premises datacenter to VMware Cloud on AWS.

While researching this topic, I also came to learn that this information can be retrieved using the NSX-T Policy API which is available to all customers to use. We are going to be leveraging the Tier-0 statistics interface API from NSX-T which will give us both transmit and receive stats on all supported interfaces. From the diagram below, we can see the interfaces that are applicable to VMware Cloud on AWS is the Internet interface which includes VPN traffic, VPC interface which includes traffic going to Linked VPC and Direct Connect interface which includes traffic when using AWS Direct Connect.

As you might expect, these exact same three interface types is then represented as logical interfaces within the NSX-T Policy API which uses the following IDs:

cross-vpc
public
direct-connect

Note: Statistics on the Direct Connect interface will also include traffic if you are using the new VMware Transit Connect with AWS Transit Gateway feature.

These interface can be discovered by performing a GET on /policy/api/v1/infra/tier-0s/vmc/locale-services/default/interfaces and then you would then identify the two NSX-T Edge (Active/Passive) and construct the T0 URL to retrieve the statistics. I will not bore you with the details and have implemented this as a new PowerShell function called Get-NSXTT0Stats and for those interested in the implementation, please see the code here.

Note: For those wanting to see the full NSX-T Policy REST URLs, simply append -Troubleshoot flag and that will output additional information on how I am retrieving the various pieces of information required to call into the T0 Stats API.

Is vSphere with Kubernetes available for evaluation?

07/14/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Yes. Given the frequency that this question has come up, I thought it would be useful to share some more details on how you can start playing with the new vSphere with Kubernetes (K8s) capability which was introduced as part of the vSphere 7.0 release. vSphere w/K8s requires NSX-T and although vSphere (ESXi and vCenter Server Appliance) has supported a 60 day evaluation period, NSX-T historically did not support any self-service evaluation. In addition, there were also some confusion in how vSphere w/K8s was bundled today from a packaging standpoint which is offered as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 SKU.

Putting aside the pricing and packaging aspects, customers can indeed evaluate vSphere w/K8s using one of the following two options below:

Option 1: 60 Day Eval

Sign up for the vSphere 7.0 (ESXi & VCSA) evaluation (https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=vsphere-eval-7) and NSX-T 3.0 evaluation (https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=nsx-t-eval). After signing up you will receive evaluation keys that can be used when setting up vSphere w/K8s. If you want to quickly go from 0 to Kubernetes, be sure to check out my vSphere with K8s Automation Lab Deployment which can give you a running environment in under 30min!

Option 2: 365 Day Eval

Sign up for VMUG Advantage which includes VMUGEval that provides licenses for vSphere 7.0, NSX-T 3.0, VCF 4.0 and many other VMware products for an entire year for non-production usage. After signing up you will receive license keys that will be valid for 1 year which can then be used when setting up vSphere w/K8s. With VMUG Advantage, you can consume vSphere w/K8s the "manual" method, using my vSphere with K8s Automation Lab Deployment or using SDDC Manager which is part of VCF 4.0 to automatically deployed the required SDDC infrastructure so that can then enable vSphere w/K8s.

Here is a screenshot of my vSphere w/K8s environment which was deployed using my Sphere with K8s Automation Lab Deployment script and using the evaluation keys which I had just signed up!

Option 3: Infinite Day Eval

VMware Hands-on-Lab is another great option which is completely free and you only need a web browser! You can check out HOL-2113-01-SDC for more details.