Network and Compute Profiles are required before you can deploy any Service Meshes.
Network Profiles define the 4 x networks used by the IX appliances and the 2 used by NE appliances as shown below:
Network Profiles
When creating a Network Profile, you select the PortGroup / Backing Network, give the profile a Name, provide an IP Pool of free IP addresses, the Subnet and Gateway they use, DNS, DNS Suffix and a Tag for the traffic type.
Note – You can have one simple Network Profile and use it for All Traffic types, this vastly simplifies the config for a Lab environment but is not recommended for Production use. Traffic needs to be separated out onto different addresses, port groups etc to get optimal performance.
Network Profiles must be created in both the Source HCX Connector and the Target HCX Cloud, this can take some time and is prone to typos, especially in the IP Pool.
WARNING – You should PING Test your IP Pools to ensure no IPs are in use or you may cause an outage.
HCX does not perform in use checks, it only keeps tabs of which IPs are are allocated to HCX appliances.
If you delete an IX or NE appliance, its IP addresses will be released back into the pool.
Finally, the IP Pool can contain multiple ranges and individual IP addresses but is recommended to try and get a contiguous block of addresses for ease of use.
The Inputs
Automating the creation of the network pools saves time and effort.
The example below uses the previous HCXConfig CSV file with the source and target HCX, vCenter servers and credentials plus a new NetworkProfiles CSV with the following data:
Profiles 1 to 4 are for the Source side, profiles 5 to 8 are for the Target. You can play around with this as you want, my example code only takes in those 8 profiles.
Note – When using it is raw text format, everything except the row and column headers should be surrounded my quotation marks or the CSV file will not be processed correctly:
The Script
OK, onto the script.
The same hashtable model is used, 2 x hashtables this time, one for basic inputs and one for the profile details in the CSV above.
The only additional config for the new hashtable it is count the number of header rows, this can be used to then process X amount of profiles in a loop.
In this example we read in the 8 profiles as shown.
We can then connect to the source vCenter and HCX and start creating these HCX Network profiles.
Note – vCenter access is needed to check the PortGroup exists before adding to HCX.
Note – HCX will not let you create more than 1 x Profile with the same PortGroup / Backing Network.
The script will then get the input for the Profile being processed, output them to the screen so you have visibility.
The next check is very important, the script checks a PortGroup with the name provided – 1. exists and 2. is not in use by another network profiles, if both are true, a valid Network Backing is found and can be used.
Finally, we cake the network backing and the other values and create the profiles using the New-HCXNetworkProfile cmdlet.
New-HCXNetworkProfile -PrimaryDNS $PrimaryDNS -SecondaryDNS $SecondaryDNS -DNSSuffix $DNSSuffix -Name $Name -GatewayAddress $GatewayAddress -IPPool $IPPool -Network $NewNetworkBacking -PrefixLength $PrefixLength
Write-Output "Network profile '$Name' created successfully."That is 1 x Network Profile created, the script will then progress through the other profiles in the CSV. A little magic happens once it has processed the source profiles 0 to 3, a simple check validates you are now on Profile 4, it disconnects HCX and vCenter, connects to the target HCX and vCenter before carrying on and creating the remaining target Network Profiles:
The Results
Once the dust settles, check your HCX Managers and the Network Profiles should be there.
If you have many Profiles to create to support multiple clusters etc, consider just pasting the requirements 8 at a time into the CVS, running it, doing another 8.
Compute Profiles
For compute profiles, you ‘could’ read the config for many into another hashtable but for the simple purposes of my lab, as I only have 1 source cluster and 1 target cluster, I have taken the liberty to reuse the Network Profile data.
The script simply looks at the Network Profile names and tries to match them to one of the 4 network types i.e. Management, vMotion, Replication and Uplink:
The last two items needed are the datastore and the proposed compute profile name, I’m aware that there could technically be more than 1 x datastore on a cluster and for the real-world you may want to use a CSV to define this.
Lastly, we run the New-HCXComputeProfile cmdlet:
New-HCXComputeProfile -ManagementNetworkProfile $managementNetworkProfile -Name $computeProfileName -Service BulkMigration,Interconnect,Vmotion,RAV -Datastore $datastore -DeploymentResource $cluster -ServiceCluster $cluster -vMotionNetworkProfile $vmotionNetworkProfile -uplinkNetworkProfile $uplinkNetworkProfile -vSphereReplicationNetworkProfile $replNetworkProfileNote – This should be run after creating the 4 x source profiles and then after creating the 4 x target profiles, that way you are connected to the correct HCX Manager.
Note – My example code does not add network extension services, to do this you need to get the DVS using the cmdlet Get-HCXInventoryDVS, add the service NetworkExtension and then pass the parameter -DistributedSwitch $dvs
$dvs = Get-HCXInventoryDVS -Compute $cluster -Name "DSwitch"
New-HCXComputeProfile -ManagementNetworkProfile $managementNetworkProfile -Name "myComputeProfile" -Service BulkMigration,Interconnect,Vmotion,RAV,NetworkExtension -Datastore $datastore -DeploymentResource $cluster -ServiceCluster $cluster -DistributedSwitch $dvs -vMotionNetworkProfile $vmotionNetworkProfile -uplinkNetworkProfile $uplinkNetworkProfile -vSphereReplicationNetworkProfile $replNetworkProfileThanks for reading…
Ready to move on? Click here for blog 8 of 9 – Service Meshes
Click the YouTube video link below to watch the script create these network profiles, compute profiles and a test ServiceMesh: