NSX-T

Creating #VMConAWS #NSX-T Firewall Rules and Segments with #PowerCLI

June 6, 2022 Bilal Ahmed 0

Well hello there. I had a customer that was wanting to do some work using scripting to create NSX-T segments and DFW rules in VMConAWS, for their PROD SDDC and for their new VCDR SDDC. Over the years I have seen a lot of people think that copying the VM data and being able to recover is the hard part when that can be the easiest part. Things like VCDR are designed to get your copies of the VMs up and running, but what about the networking and firewall rules you need to ensure communication works and is still secure? So, this ended up being a discussion on the various ways to create rules on both SDDCS and this led […]

NSX CSM (Cloud Service Manager) CA Certificate

February 3, 2022 Chris Noon 0

I recently worked on a customer project where they replaced the NSX Manager certificate with a company-signed certificate using their own CA. This caused an issue when pairing the CSM with the NSX Manager, i.e. certificate error. This short blog post will run through the steps ran through to allow the CSM to peer with the NSX Manager. I understand this post won’t receive a lot of traffic, my hope is it helps someone in the future. The Procedure SSH to the CSM and login as root. Prepare your root CA cert in perm format and upload it to the CSM. On the CMS, get the JKS password from the following file: PASSWORD=`cat /config/http/.http_cert_pw` Add the root CA cert to […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer

April 11, 2021 Chris Noon 5

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer Thanks to Siegfried Huijgen I ended up receiving a lot of attention on the 5 part series, which spun off into a request for a part 6 on Avi Networks Load Balancing. While the other posts have focused on security, it makes perfect sense to include the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Networks) into the mix of complementary services for VDI’s. For the remainder of the post please […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.

March 16, 2021 Chris Noon 5

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer The final post of this series will be around NSX IDS (Intrusion Detection System) and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). Both these products are used to highlight attacks targetted around a VMware environment. While the dFW does a great job of providing zero trust access, what if someone tries to take advantage of that open access? This is the use case for IDS/IPS. IDS and IPS used to be […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.

February 28, 2021 Chris Noon 5

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer Unfortunately, this post will be more of a theoretical one. I don’t have access to any introspection service providers. That said, I think it is something that should be discussed as it adds huge benefits. If any partner out there is reading this and wants to give me a trial of their product, I’m happy to write a Part 4.5 of this series. Introspection Services Concepts. Introspection services […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.

January 29, 2021 Chris Noon 5

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer Before I start. Shout out to Bilal Ahmed, a fellow vMusketeer who helped me with this post. In this part of the series, we will look into IDFW (Identity Firewalling). IDFW is becoming an increasingly popular feature in VDI and RDSH environments. It allows security constructs to be applied to AD (Active Directory) groups, rather than the IP addresses. This promotes ease of mobility and reduction of operational […]

Complement your VDI environment with NSX.

November 26, 2020 Chris Noon 6

@Twitter@Linkedin Part 1: Complement your VDI environment with NSX.Part 2: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: dFW.Part 3: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDFW.Part 4: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Introspection Services.Part 5: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: IDS/IPS.Part 6: Complement your VDI environment with NSX: Advanced Load Balancer Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a number of customers that are keen to see how NSX can complement their existing or new VDI environment(s). N.B. I say VDI a lot in this article, but it applies to both VDI and RDSH. As soon as this discussion starts my mind leaps into distributed Firewalling, Identity Firewalling, Introspection Services and Intrusion Detection/Prevention Services. I think it’s […]

NSX-T Automation using Terraform: The how (VMC)!

August 10, 2020 Chris Noon 3

I started the series with a post about why I wanted to use Terraform. Now we have the why out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff… the how! I use Terraform for 2 things. The first is to spin up SDDC’s on VMC and configure the VMC NSX-T piece. The second is spinning up NSX-T environments in the lab, which will hopefully make it into production one day. In this post, I’ll focus on the VMC element. The VMC Environment. I’ll start by assuming you know what VMC on AWS is and have a high-level understanding of its concepts and what it delivers. I’ll skip the step for deploying a VMC SDDC using Terraform, but if you […]