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VMware on AWS - How to restore NSX DFW firewall rules to previous state

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Customers who uses NSX day-in, day-out would like to have a point-in time restore functionality of DFW firewall rules. Many customer have a large footprints in VMC and make changes to DFW quite often. This feature was missing for long time and we could see its included in recent versions . Let's see how DFW configuration roll back works  NSX DFW configuration has versioning, and it is stored in the NSX Manager.  Every time when someone update DFW configuration, NSX creates one more version but keep storing the previous ones. You can rollback for previous config but reapplying it once again.  You can find the options under Networking & Security tab , > Security > Distributed Firewall . In the right side we see an Actions drop down. Choose View to get to the below screen.  Let’s go through the use case:  1. Original state- default config with no custom rules:  a. There are no saved configurations during last 30 days: In my existing test setup, with the current setting

How can VMware Integrated Containers be useful in real life scenario - PART2

In this post we see the options to deploy the Virtual Container Hosts ( VCH)

Ref: https://github.com/rdjagadeesh/vic_homelab/

The previous post talks about vSphere Integrated Containers and their benefits. The VIC offers a robust solution that enables the vSphere environment to quickly get containers up and running in their current vSphere infrastructure. This environment can be useful for migrating current apps to containers or for in-house development.

Architecture

In a traditional container environment, containers run as threads within the container host. vSphere Integrated Containers leverage the native constructs of vSphere for provisioning container-based applications into its own container running its own very minimal Linux kernel with just enough code to run a Docker image, thus preventing any issue with containers being accessed from other containers by pushing isolation of the container down to the hypervisor layer that is much better at handling this type of isolation.

This isolation permits IT directors to deliver an instrumentation atmosphere while not having to create a separate, specialized instrumentation infrastructure stack. By deploying every instrumentation image as a vSphere virtual machine (VM), vSphere Integrated Containers permits these workloads to leverage vital vSphere application availableness and performance options like vSphere hour angle, vMotion, DRS and a lot of. vSphere Integrated Containers provides these options whereas still presenting a jack API to developers of container-based applications.

The VIC engine is that the mechanism that gives this docker API to the container VM’s. It permits the provisioning and management of VMs into vSphere clusters using the docker binary image format. It allows vSphere admins to pre-allocate certain amounts of compute, networking and storage and provides that to developers as a self-service portal using a familiar Docker-compatible API. It permits developers that already know docker to develop in containers and deploy them aboard ancient VM-based workloads on vSphere clusters.

Virtual Container Host Deployment Options: 

In VIC, we can deploy virtual container hosts (VCHs) that serve as Docker API endpoints. VCHs allow Docker developers to provision containers as VMs in your vSphere environment.

  1. Deploy Virtual Container hosts in the vSphere Client 
  2. Deploy Virtual Container hosts using the vic-machine CLI utility 
  3. Deploy a Virtual Container host through the vRealize Automation Portal ( vRA/vRO) 

Option 1: Deploy VCH in the vSphere client procedure  

If you have installed the HTML5 plug-in for vSphere Integrated Containers, you can deploy virtual container hosts (VCHs) interactively in the vSphere Client.

Log in to the HTML5 vSphere client with an admin account and choose "vSphere Integrated Containers" 



The vSphere Integrated Containers view presents the number of VCHs and container VMs that you have deployed to this vCenter Server instance.



Click on the deployed vSphere integrated containers and select "New Virtual Container Host" option. Provide a name for the VCH instance

Optionally we can also forward the logs to syslog or the vRealize Log insight server




Choose a cluster where you want to deploy a VCH



Provide the compute details

By default it takes 1 vCPU and 2 GB of Memory. In my experience, it works seamlessly well with 2 vCPU and 8 GB of memory.

Provide storage/datastore information. I recommend enabling anonymous volumes, which creates a path by default. If not then you could need to create/attach a volume manually post the deployment



Configure Networks - It is mandated to provide the Bridge network and Public network.

NOTE: It is mandated to create a dedicated BRIDGE NETWORK PORT GROUP for EACH VCH. If you reuse the same PORT GROUP then you would end up with duplicate IPs on C-VMS/container VMS




Security options - you can also turn off this option in your closed/POC/test setup.

 Registry access:  Leave it to default values unless you have some restrictions applied to download the registry entities in your network



Provide the operations user details - this is to deploy the VCH VM in your setup and also to access the ESXi host logs

In the next step, review and submit the request. Once the deployment is successful, you should see the below details with the right IP address.




In the vSphere client, we should be able to see a resource group/pool created with the same name as a VCH

NOTE: Each VCH creates its own Resource POOL where all the C-VMs/ container vms are grouped.


Once you have the DOCKER API IP details, navigate to VIC administrator portal and add the VCH to the project




Name a PROJECT where you want to add the VCH to.



Add host to the PROJECT



Add members who are entitled to access the project



Add the VCH host







Once the host is added it lists under the Infrastructure tab. We can add multiple hosts in this project



Choose the newly created PROJECT




Hosts are added to the Project and we are ready to spin our first C-VM/container.




In our next post, we see other options to deploy the VCH. 

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