In my previous post I explained how to quickly interpret a network capture on ESXi by using pktcap-uw and tcpdump-uw. This works great to get some information at a glance. But what if you require some further analysis? Well, then Wireshark is probably your tool of choice. Check out the rest of this blog post to learn how to set up remote capturing so you don’t need temporary storage on ESXi for your capture files.
As a vSphere admin you are sometimes tasked with investigating network issues. You don’t always have VM access so you need to diagnose at the ESXi level. Now as some of you may know quickly gaining insight in VM network traffic by capturing it on the ESXi level is a rather complex task. The tool at your disposal for capturing VM traffic is called pktcap-uw and one of it’s biggest shortcomings is that it doesn’t interpret the packets.
Recently I upgraded a NSX-T multisite deployment. Unfortunately following the upgrade on one of the local sites it failed to display that site’s status on the system overview page.
NSX-T makes it very easy to deploy virtual edge transport nodes using the NSX manager. Simply fill in a couple of variables and it will make sure a new node is created by importing an OVF file on your vSphere environment. But once deployed not all settings can be changed. This is where the NSX manager API can be a useful tool.
A feature that was introduced in vSphere 7 is the ability to use pcap (tcpdump) filters with pktcap-uw. One of the use cases where this can be useful is filtering for TCP control bits.
In this post I wanted to draw your attention to a couple of Docker images I created. I found that while increasingly automating more aspects of my homelab deployment I needed a place to execute my code. And running this on my laptop isn’t always the best choice.
Have you ever found yourself wondering when a certain ESXi server was installed? In this case VMware GSS has your back. Check out KB 2144905 to find a simple esxcli command that dissects the hosts UUID to give you the installation date of that specific host. But what if you want to audit an entire cluster? This is where Powershell can help you out.
Lately I’ve been interacting a lot with REST APIs. I found that testing an API from within an application can sometimes cause some issues. For instance, when setting up a webhook notification instance using vROPS you only have a simple test button. But what if the application you want to access requires authentication and all you want to test is if you are able to access a URL via a HTTP proxy server?
The way in which you can customize notifications in vROPS has significantly improved in version 8.6. You now have the ability to use payload templates that can include all sorts of vROPS properties. This way you can make your alerts much more meaningful.
The nested ESXi appliances that William Lam provides to the community are great resources for testing. But what about interoperability? Can you run a nested ESXi 7 VM on a ESXi 6.7 server? Unfortunately the answer is; it depends.