Insights on VMware HCX, Virtualization, and other products

How to enable extra settings in HCX that PowerCLI cannot (yet)

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by

graemeash1
in ,

I’m not sure about you, but I like to try and use the latest features of a product when they are released, I also like to automate their use.

PowerCLI is great but does tend to lag behind new product releases.

As of right now (Aug 2024) there are a few features not supported with PowerCLI:

  • Setting Network Profile traffic Tags i.e. Management, vMotion. etc
  • Enabling the ‘Is Secure’ checkbox
  • Defining a specific ServiceMesh for a Mobility Group / Migration.
  • A few others

For this blog, I am going to discuss a ‘workaround / bandaid’ for the top 2 items mentioned.

Bandaid Options

There are a few ways to deal with it:

  • Rewrite your code to be 100% API driven, this requires a lot of skill and patience as you need to enumerate all the other values needed to build a new profile like ‘vCenterInstanceUuid’ and ‘distributedVirtualSwitch’ plus have a black belt in JSON manipulation
  • Re-use your code and edit the profiles after creation using API calls (update profile)
  • Re-use your code and edit the profiles after creation using API calls (delete and replace profile)

I am going with Option 3 – Delete and Replace Profile

The First Step in the Process:

The first step is to get the new Network Profile ID, this can easily be done with the Get-HCXNetworkProfile cmdlet.

$ProfileDetails = Get-HCXNetworkProfile -Name $Name
$ProfileID = $ProfileDetails.Id

You can now call the hybridity/api/networks API to get the NetworkProfile configuration:

Note – I have simply reused the ‘Connect-HcxServer’ function out of William Lam’s VMware.HCX.psm1 file (Thanks William). I have copied it out into my script and renamed the function as ‘HCX_APIConnect‘ so it doesn’t interfere with the out the box Connect-HCXServer shipped with PowerCLI.

Dark Magic

Now a little slight of hand, we convert the API response from JSON so we can edit it easily.

Next we do a basic search and replace.

Line by line, the code below does the following:

  1. Checks ‘The underlay is secure‘ checkbox, this is required on ALL Network Profiles used by a Compute Profile if you wish to disable Encryption in a ServiceMesh and test peak throughput.

2. Simply clears the previous ObjectID for the Network Profile

3. Sets the Tags on the Network Profile, these are only used as preferences when creating your Compute Profiles and can be overridden.

Note – ‘fleet‘ is for the new ‘HCX Intersite Control‘ feature, see the Whats News in HCX 4.10 blog for more detail.

$jsonstring.Security.isSecure = $true
$jsonstring.objectId = ""
$jsonstring.recommendationTags = "management","uplink","replication","vmotion","fleet"

Note – you can only pick 5 tags, even though 6 are available. Typically you would only choose one or two per Profile anyway.

Applying the Updates

Now we break stuff!

First of all, we delete that Network Profile, no one wants it.

Then we simply create a new one with its updated JSON……..

Flip back to HCX Manager and there you go, nice new features enabled in your Network Profile.

Scaling out.

To make better use of this, you can convert the code into a Function so it can be called as part of a loop after each network Profile is created by PowerCLI.