Tools

2020? Really? Already? Think for a moment…it’s hard to believe that 2050 is as far as 1990! I know it’s a bit late for New Year post, but it’s still an excellent exercise to have a look at this last year.

Now that VMware NSX-T Data Center is deployed in your environment and that you are consuming its network and security services such as switching, routing, firewalling or load balancing, what about day 2 operations? It turns out that NSX-T offers a central CLI to facilitate operations and troubleshooting.

Time spent in airports and lounges can be used for various things, but I generally take the advantage not only to catch up on emails but also to work on things that I can “fire and forget” (such as upgrades in my lab). Last Saturday, I missed a connection and was stuck at JFK airport for quite a while. I took the opportunity to upgrade one of my deployment to NSX-T 2.3.1 and PKS 1.2.4.

I had to deploy NSX-T and PKS to a new infrastructure lately. The usage of a jump host was inevitable as my home bandwidth is not great to upload many GB to a remote site. I can deploy OVA using OVF Tool or via govc (#rungovc) and I was already familiar of the Pivnet CLI to download Pivotal products…all I was missing was a capability to download VMware products using CLI and I was happy to discover that the vmw-cli client can exactly do that for me.

When it comes to automation, I’m a big consumer of PowerCLI. Automation can be leveraged in many contexts, such as: Virtual machines lifecycles Infrastructure configuration Remediation and self-healing …and much more! As much as I like VMware PKS, I also need to work on regular Kubernetes: for that, I require the ability to deploy a number of virtual machines based on a Linux template and to configure them with different settings (masters, etcd, and workers nodes). ...