Book Image

VMware NSX Network Essentials

By : sreejith c
Book Image

VMware NSX Network Essentials

By: sreejith c

Overview of this book

VMware NSX is at the forefront of the software-defined networking revolution. It makes it even easier for organizations to unlock the full benefits of a software-defined data center – scalability, flexibility – while adding in vital security and automation features to keep any sysadmin happy. Software alone won’t power your business – with NSX you can use it more effectively than ever before, optimizing your resources and reducing costs. Getting started should be easy – this guide makes sure it is. It takes you through the core components of NSX, demonstrating how to set it up, customize it within your current network architecture. You’ll learn the principles of effective design, as well as some things you may need to take into consideration when you’re creating your virtual networks. We’ll also show you how to construct and maintain virtual networks, and how to deal with any tricky situations and failures. By the end, you’ll be confident you can deliver, scale and secure an exemplary virtualized network with NSX.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
VMware NSX Network Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

VMware Installation Bundle


Hypervisors are basically the backbone of network virtualization. Virtual machines are able to leverage NSX features primarily because the ESXi host is a network-virtualized host. One of the most critical pillars of an NSX installation is ESXi host preparation. If we don't have the right modules running in the ESXi host, the whole purpose of leveraging NSX features will be defeated. Symptoms would be that we might not be able to install feature X, or we can configure feature X, but the functionality is impacted. Watch out for the following VIBs in the ESXi host:

  • esx-vxlan

  • esx-vsip

  • esx-dvfilter-switch-security (starting from NSX 6.2.0, esx-dvfilter-switch-security is part of esx-vxlan vibs)

This is the command to check if VIB is installed in ESXi host:

esxcli software vib list | grep vibname

Since these are VIBs, we can manually uninstall and install the same during break fix scenarios. But the real question is, who is pushing these VIBs? That's where I have seen the...