NSX Advanced Load Balancer

Automated Lab Deployment Script for vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

04/05/2021 by William Lam 2 Comments

After spending a few days playing with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) APIs, I am happy to share my latest automation lab deployment script for deploying vSphere with Tanzu using the new NSX ALB which was introduced with the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release.

🙌 BOOM!!!

Fully Automated vSphere with @VMwareTanzu using the new @vmwarensx Advanced Load Balancer introduced in vSphere 7.0 Update 2 Lab Deployment in just 32 minutes! 🔥

Still need to clean up some things, but this beats clicking around the UI! My 🤲 thanks me pic.twitter.com/hN32Qk3oDc

— William Lam (@lamw) March 29, 2021

Lab Deployment Automation

You can find the new automation script along with all the details at the following Github Repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-nsx-advanced-lb-automated-lab-deployment#enable-workload-management

In my environment, it took about ~32 minutes for the deployment to finish, but YMMV based on the performance of your underlying hardware.

Workload Management Automation

In addition to the automated lab deployment script above, I have also updated my community VMware.WorkloadManagement module to add support for enabling Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster using NSX ALB. This is introduced as a new function creatively called New-WorkloadManagement3. You use the Get-Help cmdlet to get a list of supported arguments or you can take a look at this example.

Disabling vSphere with Tanzu does not delete NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) Service Engine (SE) VMs

03/31/2021 by William Lam Leave a Comment

While working on some automation to deploy a vSphere 7.0 Update 2 environment that has been configured with vSphere with Tanzu and NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB), I noticed that when you disable Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster, the two NSX ALB Service Engine (SE) VMs were still left behind.

It turns out that this behavior is due to a default setting within NSX ALB that will NOT automatically delete the SE’s in the case there is a scaled up event which would then cause a re-deploy to happen. Instead, by default it is configured to wait 120 minutes (2hrs) before cleaning up.

If you wish to change this behavior, you can login to NSX ALB UI and navigate to Infrastructure->Service Engine->Advanced and update the “Delete Unused Service Engines After” to your desired value. Please note, that the shortest time interval to wait is 1 minute and if you set it to 0, it means the SE’s VMs not be deleted.

After saving this change, the next time you disable Workload Management, the SE VMs will automatically get cleaned based on the time interval you had configured.

Automating default admin password change for NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

03/30/2021 by William Lam 5 Comments

Over the weekend I got a chance to deploy my first vSphere with Tanzu environment using the new NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) which I had shared on Twitter.

🥳 Successfully deployed my 🥇 vSphere w/@VMwareTanzu using the new @vmwarensx Advanced Load Balancer (formally @AviNetworks)

👉https://t.co/Mqb9Ja0rtV was extremely helpful, a MUST read IMHO! 👏🤙 @CormacJHogan

Visuals is NSX ALB is nice! Looks like I need more resources! pic.twitter.com/C6E36zIl7X

— William Lam (@lamw) March 28, 2021

This was also my first time getting exposed to NSX ALB (formally AVI Networks) and this detailed blog post from my buddy Cormac Hogan was instrumental in helping me quickly get started and get into the specific configurations needed for a two network design with vSphere with Tanzu. For me personally, there were just too many different configuration pages a user needed to navigate to and context switching between them made it non-intuitive for a new user like myself. After going through this once, I knew Automation was the next step for me and this was also an opportunity to try out the NSX ALB API, which I also have never used before.