Exam Review CEH v12

1 CommentOther, , , , , ,

In december 2022, i took the Certified Ethical Hacking Exam v12 from EC-Council.
This exam and training were on my todo list for a couple of years already.

Training

I took the training at Startel in the Netherlands (sept. 2021) at that time it was still version 11 of the training. Startel has a sort of bond with the trainer Dimitrios Zacharopoulos. I can tell you if you want to study for CEH, you need to get trained by this guy! Awesome dude and what a lot of knowledge from the field!

During the training you get access to the iLabs of EC-Council. In this environment you can do all the practical questions you get during the training. Real handy to get familiar with the tools and commands.

The training it self was a 5 day classroom training and those days were pretty packed.
The trainer took the chapters from the study material and gave a lot of real life samples for about every situation you can think of.

If you are lucky and get the training from Dimitrios, he will give you a lot of resources which you can use during your study after the training:

– Practice exams (created by Dimitrios himself)
– Summary of almost all available Tools
– Tools
– eBooks
– Links
– Videos

It took me ages to explore all those Gigabytes of resources, but man they were handy!

I had in mind to study for the exam about 2 or 3 months after the training and then take the exam.
Yeah Right….

I think i started studying again around May 2022, from my employer i had access to the pluralsight library and there was a course Certified Ethical Hacking prep. I watched a lot of chapters and i build my own Cybersecurity homelab with the use of another pluralsight course: Build a cybersecurity lab

Aslo if you are a vExpert you also get access to the pluralsight library.

The practical studying helped me memorizing all the different tools and for which they can be used also you have to know commandline options of several tools, and what is better than hands-on studying!

Also check the EC-Council website for the latest Exam blueprint and get familiar with all the chapters and parts mentioned in it.

About the Exam

  • Number of Questions: 125
  • Test Duration: 4 hours
  • Test Format: Multiple choice
  • Test Delivery: ECC EXAM, VUE
  • Exam Prefix: 312-50 (ECC EXAM), 312-50 (VUE)

Passing Score

The individual rating of all questions contribute to an overall “Cut Score” for each exam form. To ensure each form has equal assessment standards, cut scores are set on a “per exam form” basis. Depending on which exam form is challenged, cut scores can range from 60% to 85%.

Scheduling the Exam

After i fullfilled the classroom training I got an Exam Voucher with a validity of 1 year.
I wanted to take the exam just before the Exam Voucher would expire, but ofcourse during my holiday i did not study as much as i wanted.

I didn’t fel comfortable with taking the exam, so i contacted EC-Council and extended the voucher with 3 monts. Costs around 35 dollars.

The vouchers can be extended only 1 time, this gave me an extra 3 monts to study.
I scheduled the exam on the 9th of december 10:00 at the same location where i took the training. (This was a hard requirement for the voucher).

Exam Day

Most of the time when i book an exam it is in the morning, this time was no exception.
I arrived at 9:30 at the exam center and after login and the identity check i could immediatly start.
I think it took me roughly 2.5 hours to answer all the 125 question. so from my opinion the 4 hours was more than enough.

After clicking finish, it is always a relief to see the PASSED mark on the screen.
Man i was happy after all the work i put into it.

Exam Audit

But then…. after a few days not hearing anything from EC-Council, i got the following mail in may inbox:

So i had to ask my employer for an experience letter, when i send this the exam was cut free and it was official!

I am now a Certified Ethical Hacker, Hell yeah!

READ MORE

Replace NSX-T expiring localmanager and globalmanager self-signed Certificates.

NSX-T, , , , , , ,

Recently we saw some warnings about expiring certificates in the NSX-T Global Manager and Local Manager.

When we clicked one of the alerts we got a small description and some API calls we can fire to apply new certificates.

In the Certificates overview (System > Certificates > Certificates), we could see that the certificates Issued to the Local Manager and Global Manager were expiring. The certification id’s were also corresponding to the ones in the alert (not the ones in my screenshots).

The API calls that were mentioned in the Alert description are for the renewal of certificate to the HTTP service (UI), not the Local/Global Manager certificates.
The VMware Docs don’t explain in good detail how to change these certificates, i couln’t find it.

Try it yourself:
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX-T-Data-Center/3.1/administration/GUID-50C36862-A29D-48FA-8CE7-697E64E10E37.html

The only give away i could find was in step 6: (NSX Federation and the service type).

So before we can replace the certificates, we need to create new Self Signed Certificates for the Local Manager, and the Global Manager.

Create CSR on GM/LM:

to create a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) on the Global or Local Manager go to: System > Certificates > CSRs and click on “Generate CSR“.

For the Global Manager do this via the Global Manager Appliance and for the Local Manager use the Local Manager Appliance, or use the drop down on the top of the screen to choose between your Global Manager or Local Managers.

Fill in all the fields and hit the GENERATE button, example below is for the Global Manager. For The local Manager just change the word global to local:

Now we can see a new CSR in the list, the next step is to self-sign the Global Manager CSR, select the CSR and under actions choose “Self Sign Certificate for CSR”

Choose your number of days:

Now we have a new Self-Signed certificate for the Global Manager in the certificates list, with this certificate we can replace the Principal Identity certificate for the Global Manager.

For the local manager certificates, follow the steps mentioned above on the local manager appliance.

Apply Self-Signed Certificate on the Global Manager

Before we can apply the SS certificate to the Global Manager we need to copy the certificate id, click on the ID, and then select the whole id in the pop-up and copy/paste it for later use:

Now we can Fire up Postman to apply the certificate by API:

  1. Change the ACTION drop down to POST
  2. Paste the following url to your Global Manager:

    Step 1 to 4

    5. Change to Body, select raw and from the drop-down choose JSON
    6. put the following JSON in the Body:

    {
    “cert_id”: “<new cert id>”,
    “service_type”: “GLOBAL_MANAGER”
    }

    And hit the SEND button, if you get back Status 200 OK, the API call was succesful:

    Apply Self-Signed Certificate on the Local Manager

    This procedure is almost the same as on the Global Manager. Go to the Local Manager Appliance and copy the new certificate id.

    Go to Postman:

    1. Change the ACTION drop down to POST
    2. Paste the following url to your Global Manager:

      Check the old expiring certificate

      Now since we are on version 3.1, we need to check by API if the old certificate is released so we know it isn’t used anymore before we delete it.
      Note: In Newer version you have a “Where Used” field in the certificate overview.

      Go to Postman:

      1. Change the action to GET
      2. Paste the following url to your Global Manager: (use the id of the expiring certificate)
        https://<global-manager>/api/v1/trust-management/certificates/dee8d78b-5e04-4deb-8d36-6b86f79f058b
        Set Authorization the same as the previous API Calls
      3. Select Body and set it to none
      4. Hit Send

      If the Certificate is used by a node look for the used_by part, when there is a node_id, the certificate is still in use and can’t be deleted. If it is empty, you can delete the Certificate in the UI, you can do this check on the new certificate to see if it is used by the same node.

          "used_by": [
        {
            "node_id": "515f0642-b1eb-ef39-9acc-82f8760ab0b9",
            "service_types": [
                "GLOBAL_MANAGER"
            ]
        }
    ],

      Sometimes the Certificates won’t release itself, so let’s release the damn thing:

      Release a Certificate

      Please keep in mind that you only release the certificate from the node_id if you are absolutly sure, if not please raise a ticket to VMware Support.

      1. login with the admin user to the manager with ssh
      2. then type st e, enter the root password and you are now at the shell
      3. Use the certificate id and the node_id from the previous step:
      4. now use the following API call to release the Certificate of the node_id:
        curl -k -X POST -H “Content-Type: application/json” -H ‘X-NSX-Username:admin’ -H ‘X-NSX-Groups:superuser’ -d ‘{“service_type”:”API”,”node_id”:”<node_id>“}’  “http://localhost:7440/nsxapi/api/v1/trust-management/certificates/<certificate-id>?action=release“
      5. This should do it, you can check the certificate again with the previous step and look for the used_by, this should be emtpy now.
      curl -k -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H 'X-NSX-Username:admin' -H 'X-NSX-Groups:superuser' -d '{"service_type":"GLOBAL_MANAGER","node_id":""647defab-13c5-5g62-93e4-da4a345d666"}'  "http://localhost:7440/nsxapi/api/v1/trust-management/certificates/ea5771fb-161e-49dd-97d7-c1483d2790666691?action=release"

      If the used_by is empty, you can now safely remove the certificate.

      All the steps are almost identical for the Global and Local Manager, just change the service types for GLOBAL_MANAGER to LOCAL_MANAGER, etc.

      And the Alerts are now Resolved!

      READ MORE

Design Consideration – For Bare Metal Edge with 4 PNIC in a NSX-T Federated Environment

NSX-T, , , , , ,

During a failover test with the Bare Metal Edges we ran into an issue when pulling the plug on 1 of the TOR switches. (TOR-LEFT). During that test all BGPs on both Bare Metal edges went down. So no North-South routing anymore 🙁

Edge Setup:

The Bare Metal Edges were configured following the design guidelines from VMware:
https://nsx.techzone.vmware.com/resource/nsx-t-reference-design-guide-3-0#_Edge_Node_and_1

Indentifying the problem:

So why this behaviour? And what happens when we pull the plug on the other TOR switch (TOR-RIGHT).
After performing the test with the TOR-RIGHT, the BGPs connected to TOR Left stayed established. So it has something to do with switch TOR-LEFT?

After checking the configuration on the TOR-LEFT switch we didn’t identified something that could cause this issue. But what could it be? Edges were configured by VMware guidelines and were identical configuration wise.

So going through the logs was the next step in the process, and i stumbled upon this part in the log file:

2022-10-17T10:37:08.578Z Update device fp-eth0 state to DOWN
2022-10-17T10:37:08.578Z Self Node 00363d34-fcdd-11ea-8e07-e4434ba66042 status changed from Up to Down (RTEP device down)

Can it have something to do with the federated setup (RTEP), is the RTEP only connecting over fp-eth0?

Cause:

Again i went through the setup but now i also checked the fp-eth0 connections to the switches. On both BareMetal Edges the fp-eth0 was connected to the TOR-LEFT. So when we pulled the plug on that Switch it triggered the RTEP going down, which led to all BGP session going down.

This is expected behavior according to VMware!

Solution:

The solution to this issue was pretty simple after we identified the cause. We switched the connection on the second Bare Metal Edge, so the pnics connected to TOR LEFT will be on TOR-RIGHT and vice versa. The opposite of the first Bare Metal Edge.

READ MORE

RTEP down in Global Manager NSX-T UI

NSX-T, , ,

A while ago we ran into an issue after we did the upgrade from NSX-T version 3.1.3.6 to 3.1.3.7. In the alarms section at one Site. Still wanted to do a post about the issue and the solution/workaround:

Time to check the connection!
Login to the Edges and grap the VRF id of the RTEP TUNNEL.

Check the BGP and ping between the RTEP ip addresses on both sites.

As you can see all BGPs are established and the ping commands give a reply.
Let’s do another check from Postman:

Open Postman and fire a GET api call to the nsx-manager to grab the edge id we need in the next api call:
API GET call:

https://<nsxmanager ip>/api/v1/transport-nodes/

Just select Basic Auth under the Authorization tab and fill in the Admin credentials.

Hit Send, when getting a reply in the Body, search for the edge name and the corresponding id.

Now we use this id to get the RTEP status:

GET https://<nsxmanagerip>/api/v1/transport-nodes/<edgenodeid>/inter-site/bgp/summary

Check the output and the Return Status for issues, as you can see in the example above the BGP to one of the peers is establised.

Solution:

So it seems like the issue is known in the 3.1.3.7 version in a 3 manager nodes setup.

The node which has generated the alarm, only that node can clear alarm from in-memory when it will receive remove alarm from the edge node. The Alarm was resolved on 1 of the manager nodes, but it was showing on other nodes and it was keeping the alarm as active.

The following workaround will remove the alarm: Restart the proton service on ALL manager nodes.

– SSH with the admin user to the NSX-T manager nodes:
– execute the following commands:

Stop service proton
Start service proton

UPDATE: The issue is fixed in version 3.2.1

READ MORE

Upload MUB file fails with ansible-for-nsxt

NSX-T, , , , , ,

While trying to upgrade the NSX-T enviroment via ansible we stumbled upon the issue that we couldn’t upload the mub file to the NSX Manager.

Ansible Task:

- name: Upload upgrade file to NSX-T manager coordinator node from file
  vmware.ansible_for_nsxt.nsxt_upgrade_upload_mub:
    hostname: "{{ coordinator }}"
    username: "{{ username }}"
    password: "{{ password }}"
    validate_certs: False
    file: "{{ nsx_upgrade_mub_file }}"

This gave us the following error message:

fatal: [127.0.0.1]: FAILED! => {
    "changed": true,
    "invocation": {
        "module_args": {
            "file": "/root/hypervisor/upgrade_bundle/VMware-NSX-upgrade-bundle-3.2.1.1.0.20115686.mub",
            "hostname": "manager1",
            "password": "VALUE_SPECIFIED_IN_NO_LOG_PARAMETER",
            "port": 443,
            "timeout": 9000,
            "url": null,
            "username": "admin",
            "validate_certs": false
        }
    },
    "msg": "Error: string longer than 2147483647 bytes"

So it looks like the upload can’t handle files over 2GB.

Honoustly my python skills are a bit rusty, so i asked one of the developers in our team to help me out and see if we could get this fixed.

The 2GB+ filesize is the issue. You can find multiple references to the error, usually referring to the httplib, urllib or ssl..
One solution is to use streaming upload.

This is what we did to make the upload work.

Install request-toolbelt package

Edit nsxt_upgrade_upload_mub.py
NOTE: This will break the URL upload!
Add:

import requests
from requests_toolbelt.multipart import encoder
from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth

Replace line 140 – 174 with:

        session = requests.Session()
        with open(file_path, 'rb') as src_file:
             body = encoder.MultipartEncoder({
                 "file": (src_file.name, src_file, "application/octet-stream")
             })
             headers = {"Prefer": "respond-async", "Content-Type": body.content_type}
             resp = session.post(mgr_url + endpoint, auth=HTTPBasicAuth(mgr_username, mgr_password), timeout=None, verify=False, data=body, headers=headers)
             bundle_id = 'latest'#resp['bundle_id']
             headers = dict(Accept="application/json")
             headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/json'
             try:
                 wait_for_operation_to_execute(mgr_url,
                     '/upgrade/bundles/%s/upload-status'% bundle_id,
                     mgr_username, mgr_password, validate_certs,
                     ['status'], ['SUCCESS'], ['FAILED'])
             except Exception as err:
                 module.fail_json(msg='Error while uploading upgrade bundle. Error [%s]' % to_native(err))
             module.exit_json(changed=True, ip_address=ip_address,
             message='The upgrade bundle %s got uploaded successfully.' % module.params[mub_type])
        session.close()

NOTE: This will break the URL upload!

The response will show:

changed: [127.0.0.1] => {
    "changed": true,
    "invocation": {
        "module_args": {
            "file": "/upgrade_bundle/VMware-NSX-upgrade-bundle-3.2.1.1.0.20115686.mub",
            "hostname": "nsxmanager",
            "password": "VALUE_SPECIFIED_IN_NO_LOG_PARAMETER",
            "port": 443,
            "timeout": 9000,
            "url": null,
            "username": "admin",
            "validate_certs": false
        }
    },
    "ip_address": "<ip>",
    "message": "The upgrade bundle /upgrade_bundle/VMware-NSX-upgrade-bundle-3.2.1.1.0.20115686.mub got uploaded successfully."
}

Solution is also added to a github BUG report:

https://github.com/vmware/ansible-for-nsxt/issues/416

All Kudos to my colleague for fixing the issue!

READ MORE

VMware Usagemeter issue sending data after upgrade to 4.5.0.1

Other, , , ,

This week i upgraded an usagemeter from 4.5.0.0 to 4.5.0.1 with the inplace upgrade method.
Usage Meter 4.5.0.1 patch release rolled out on May 23rd. This release addresses a major issue found in Usage Meter 4.5. For more information i refer to the following blog:

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudprovider/2022/05/usage-meter-4-5-0-1-why-is-it-needed-and-how-to-upgrade-to-it.html

The release notes can be found at:
https://docs.vmware.com/en/vCloud-Usage-Meter/4.5.0.1/rn/vmware-vcloud-usage-meter-4501-release-notes/index.html

We followed the upgrade guide provided by VMware:
https://docs.vmware.com/en/vCloud-Usage-Meter/4.5/Getting-Started-vCloud-Usage-Meter/GUID-AE5A81E1-097A-4EED-9A8E-8BF7E0B378A4.html?hWord=N4IghgNiBcIJYDsC0AHCYDGBTABAVxQHMAlAQQBEBREAXyA

After the reboot and check if the upgrade was successful we tried to send a test update to the Usage Insight. The test send of data failed with thw following error:

In the notifications we can find the following messages:

After a search through the VMware Knowlegde Base I came across this article:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/82023

To test connectivity to vCloud Usage Insight by using the curl command:

curl -kv https://ums.cloud.vmware.com/um/api/v1/ping --proxy 192.168.1.50:8080

The response came back with HTTP status code 200, so that was OK.

Now we check the vCloud Usage Meter registration status in vCloud Usage Insight by using the curl command:

curl -kv https://ums.cloud.vmware.com/um/api/v1/upload/registration?um=<UM UUID> --proxy 192.168.1.50:8080

This response also came back with HTTP status code 200, so AOK, so far for the checks…

Let’s get in touch with GSS

As this was the advice all along in the first error message ….

The GSS engineer stated that there was an issue with the nginx jvm settings when using a proxy.
We had to add a line to the nginx.conf in the following directory, but before we change anything lets make a snapshot of the system in case we ruin everything.

Remark: Please contact GSS if you want support editing files, and always make a backup or in this case a snapshot before changing settings

Edit the nginx.conf and add the follwing line somewhere around line 58,

This line set a dummy file for proxy configuration., we are setting a dummy proxy configuration as we are hitting a known issue and this will be fixed in a future release.

jvm_options "-Dproxy_config=/tmp/vami-file";

Go down one dir to /opt/vmware/cloudusagemetering

Stop NGINX service with the follwing command:

./scripts/stop.sh GW

Now start the service again:

Start NGINX service

Now get the status of all services:

You see a lot of errors, these can be ignored.

Now go to the VAMI UI and reset the proxy again:

Test

Now go to the Settings Page in the Usage Meter UI and Send an update to Usage Insight.

It works! You can also check the usagemeter in Insight: Go to https://ums.cloud.vmware.com/ui/
The last update should be after the issue was fixed!

Remark: Please contact GSS if you want support editing files, and always make a backup or in this acse a snapshot before changing settings

READ MORE

NSX-T IP Discovery & Realized Bindings Issues

1 CommentNSX-T, , ,

Last week i was at the VMware Tech Summit in Cork, Ireland. I attended a session about NSX-T troubleshooting. During this session a lot of issues came to the stage which i dealt with in the last year or so.

One of the is issues was about the IP Bindings of a VM to a segment. In our case a tenant manually edited the Ipv4 address on the network Interface of the VM, and after this the connection to this VM dropped.

DFW checked, routing checked al was ok. After some digging we found out that the VM had 2 IP addresses in the realized bindings section on the logical switch. This view can be found in the manager UI of the segment port.

How can you find these Realized bindings and Fix it?

To get to the right port you can do the following, Go to segments and look for the segment to which the VM is connected. Once you found it click on the number you see beneath the ports.

This opens a window where you can find all connected port to the segment, copy the Segment Port Name.

Now search in the Search Bar for this Segment Port Name, and click the one with Resource Type Logical Ports.

This takes you to the Manager UI of this Logical port. You can always go through Networking -> then Switch to Manager UI in the upper right corner -> Select logical switches -> Search through the list for the right port.

Select Address Bindings, here you can see the Auto Discovered Bindings, both with the current IP from the VM. One learned from VMware Tools and the other by ARP Snooping. But if you take a close look at the Realized Bindings you can see a different IP learned by ARP Snooping. This was the original IP the Vm had when it connected.

This can cause connection problems! In our case the whole routing was messed up and the traffic went out via the wrong Uplink.

We can fix this quickly with moving the entry with the old IP address to the Ignore Bindings:

It will take a few seconds to updated the realized Bindings with the new lP address learned by ARP Snooping.

After this the connection came up and the tenant was happy!
But this was nothing more than a quickfix, what if all tenants gone mad and they are manually changing their IP addresses in the OS…….

So why is the IP address staying in the Realized Bindings section and keeps bringing carnage?

By default, the discovery methods ARP snooping and ND snooping operate in a mode called trust on first use (TOFU). In TOFU mode, when an address is discovered and added to the realized bindings list, that binding remains in the realized list forever.

Can we modify that mode? Yes we can!

In NSX-T we use several profiles, one of those is the IP Discovery profile. This profile can be found in the Policy UI under Segments -> Segment Profiles

Create a new Ip Discovery Profile and disable the TOFU setting, When you do this, TOFU changes to Trust On Every Use (TOEU). In this TOEU mode, the discovered IP addresses are placed in the binding list and deleted when they expire. DHCP snooping and VMware tools always operate in TOEU mode.

Now we need to adjust the segment to use the new IP Discovery Profile, go to the segment and click edit.
Under Segment profiles select the new TOFU Profile, click Save and the Close Editing.

Now when a tenant changes the IP of the Network Interface Manually the old IP learned the first time by ARP Snooping is not present anymore in the Realize Bindings section.

READ MORE

vSAN 7.0 Resync Throttling

vSAN, , ,

When we upgraded to vSAN 7, immediately we faced an annoying error message in Skyline health which complained about the Resync Throttling.

This setting is deprecated since 6.7 and can only be set via Powercli, below a few lines of code to set the value to 0 to all Hosts in the cluster. When the VSAN Host is patched or sometimes we even see the warning again after a reboot. Just run the script again and the warning is gone. 

$vc="yourVC"
Connect-VIServer $vc<br>$hosts = Get-VMHost
foreach($esx in $hosts){
Write-Host "Displaying and Updating VSAN ResyncThrottle value on $esx" 
Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $esx -Name VSAN.DomCompResyncThrottle | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value 0 -confirm:$falseGet-AdvancedSetting -Entity $esx -Name VSAN.DomCompResyncThrottle
}

Please run scripts at your own risk! If you are not comfortable please contact VMware Support.

You can also check this KB article for another solution regarding the resync Throttling

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/83742

READ MORE

NSX-T Upgrade Issue – Blank Screen in UI

NSX-T, ,

During an upgrade of NSX-T from 3.1.3.6 to 3.1.3.7 i came across an issue in the UI.
When i clicked the update button, the screen was blank and was not showing any data, sometimes after a wait of half an hour or more the screen came through and i could proceed with the upgrade.

This is ofcourse not the way it should so i wanted to get rid of the issue.

Check Manager Cluster Nodes

First i wanted to check if all the cluster nodes were stable and the services were running AOK, so i ran the following command on all 3 cluster nodes:

get cluster status

All servers seem to be running fine, and didn’t show any anomalies, next i checked if there was maybe an old update plan stuck or something like that:

get node upgrade status
% Post reboot node upgrade is not in progress

But no luck with that either, now i tested what if we start the Upgrade from another manager node.

For that to be possible i needed to execute the following command on the manager node we wnat to become the orchestrator node:

set repository-ip

But after testing all nodes, no luck at all. The UI still gave me a blank screen on the Upgrade page.

Time to get support (Cause):

We raised an SR at VMware and within a few hours we got feedback.
This issue was probably caused by an inconsistent Corfu DB, that was possibly triggered by an action we did in the past an re-deployement a Manager Node after a failure.

You can identify a possible inconsistent Corfu DB by an high EPOCH number that is increasing in the /var/log/corfu/corfu-compactor-audit.log

2022-05-27T10:53:35.446Z INFO main CheckpointWriter - appendCheckpoint: completed checkpoint for fc2ada82-3ef8-335a-9fdb-c35991d3960c, entries(0), cpSize(1) bytes at snapshot Token(epoch=2888, sequence=1738972197) in 65 ms

2022-05-27T11:05:21.346Z INFO main CheckpointWriter – appendCheckpoint: completed checkpoint for fc2ada82-3ef8-335a-9fdb-c35991d3960c, entries(0), cpSize(1) bytes at snapshot Token(epoch=2921, sequence=173893455) in 34 ms

Solution

redeploy the manager nodes one-by-one…..

so here we go:

First we need to retrieve the UUID of the node we want to detach from the cluster.

get cluster status

Next run the command to detach the failed node from the cluster, from another cluster node.

detach node failed_node_uuid

The detach process might take some time, when the detaching process finishes, get the status of the cluster and check if there is indeed only 2 nodes present in the cluster.

Get cluster status

The Manager node is now detached, but the VM is still present in the vSphere Inventory, Power it down and Delete the VM. You can keep it ofcourse. But we are going to deploy a new Node with the exact same parameters, fqdn and ip. So best to disconnect the network interfaces in that case.

Now we can deploy a new Manager Node, we can do this in 2 ways.

1. From the UI

We can use the way if there is a compute manager configured where the Manager Node can be deployed.

Navigate to System > Configuration> Appliances and click Add NSX Appliance

Fill in the Hostname, IP/DNS and NTP settings and choose the Deployment size of the appliance.
In our Case this is Large and click Next.

Next fill in the configuration details for the new appliance and hit next

Followed by the credentials and the enablement of SSH and Root Access, after that hit install appliance.

Now be patient until the appliance will be deployed on the environment.

When the new appliance deployed successfully wait till all services become stable and all lights are green, check the cluster status on the CLI of the managers with:

get cluster status

If all services are stable and running on every node, you can detach the next one in line and start over until all appliances are redeployed.

2. Deploy with OVA

When you can’t deploy the new appliance from the UI, you can build it with the use of the OVA file. Download the OVA file from the VMware website:

https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads/details?downloadGroup=NSX-T-3137&productId=982

and start the deploy from OVA in vCenter.

Select the Computer resource:

Review the details and go on to the configuration part:

Select the appropriate deployment size:

Select the Storage where the appliance needs to land:

Next select the management network:

Ans Customize the template by filling in the Passwords for the accounts, IP details etc.

Hit Next and review the configuration before you deploy the appliance!

When the ova deployed successfully Power On the VM and wait till it is booted completely, an extra reboot can be part of this.

Login to a cluster node of the NSX Manager Cluster and run the following command to get the cluster thumbprint. Save this thumbprint we need this later on.

get certificate api thumbprint

And run the get cluster config command to get the cluster ID:

get cluster config

Now open an SSH session to the new node and run the join command to join the new node to the existing cluster.

join <Manager-IP> cluster-id <cluster-id> username <Manager-username> password <Manager-password> thumbprint <Manager-thumbprint>

When the join operation is successful, wait for all services to restart.

You can check the cluster status on the UI select System > Appliances.
and check if all services are up.

Check the cluster config on the manager nodes by running:

Get cluster config

Conclusion

When you have a inconsistent corfu DB, in some cases the redeployment of all manager nodes can be the solution. Be aware that you only detach 1 node and then redeploy the new one and so on. always keep 2 ore more nodes in the cluster to keep it healthy.

READ MORE

Configure NSX-T Baremetal Edge Node redundant MGMT plane

NSX-T, , ,

Recently i had to reconfigure the NSX-T Baremetal edge Nodes which were configured with only 1 NIC for the management plane to a more redundant setup. In this short write up i will show you which steps i took.

NSX Maintenance Mode

Before proceeding place the Baremetal Edge Node in Maintenance Mode to Failover the DataPath to the other Edge Node in the Cluster. We do this just in case we run into an issue during the reconfiguration. The reconfigure itself should not affect the Dataplane.

Check Current Config

SSH to the Baremetal Edge Node and login with the admin credentials and check the current config of the management interface.

On this Baremetal Edge Node we use out-of-band management interface to connect to a management VLAN X on ETHX. The port on the switch is configured as Trunk Port, the same configuration is used when we create the bond later on.

If you use an access port or native vlan on the trunk port the commands are slightly different, the interface ethX.X doesn’t have to be created and the mgmt plane is configured directly on the ethX.

First check if the Bond0 interface exists:

The bond0 or bond0.X interface (where X is the vlan number used) does not exist, we have to create the bond interface at root level.

Login as root with the command: st e and check if te bond driver is installed: lsmod |grep bond

The driver is installed, we can create the bond interface with the following command:
ip link add bond0 type bond

Exit root and check if the bond interface is created: get interface bond

The bond0 interface is now created and can be used.

Reconfigure the MGMT plane

Before we can reconfigure the management plane from the EthX to the Bond0 interface we have to clear the current configuration, the SSH connection will be disconnected so connect to the terminal of the Node:

Remove the config from EthX.X

stop service dataplane
clear interface ethX.X

if you don’t use a VLAN the commands are:
stop service dataplane
clear interface ethX ip

Create an bond0 interface with VLAN X (skip this step when not using VLAN):
set interface bond0 vlan X plane mgmt

configure the bond0.X interface:
set interface bond0.X ip x.x.x.x/x gateway x.x.x.x plane mgmt mode active-backup members eth1,eth2 primary eth1

If you don’t use VLAN the commands are:

set interface bond0 ip x.x.x.x/x gateway x.x.x.x plane mgmt mode active-backup members eth1,eth2 primary eth1

That did the trick, the management interface is now up and configured in HA

Check the bond interfaces on the Baremetal Edge Node:

You can now start the dataplane again (start service dataplane) and exit the Bare Metal Edge Node from Maintenance Mode, wait till all signs turn green!

READ MORE