On the 30th July, 2020, NSX-T 2.5.2 was released. Check out the release notes.

This is a minor update with almost 80 issues marked as fixed.

Last month VMware released updated versions of some exams, including the VCAP-NV Design exam based on NSX-T 3.0. In the past year or so I’ve been working a lot more with NSX-T, but.. I’m not a real* networking guy, so I wasn’t confident in taking NV exams.

After passing the VCP-NV on NSX-T 2.4 earlier in the year, I put off the VCAPs because they were based on NSX-T 2.4 or NSX-v 6.x, but with the updated exam out, I was running out of excuses.

You might have heard there’s a pandemic going on, so doing exams remotely is the only option here, and suited me.

Finally getting around to upgrading to ESXi 7.0, and I was stuck pretty quickly, with the error: BOOT_DISK_SIZE ERROR.

Switching between a mix of different product versions, I forget some of the specifics, and I’ve wasted too much time troubleshooting something that was working OK. Hopefully this saves you some time.

Here’s a few tips from what I do when deploying Photon OS in the lab. Keep in mind this is only for troubleshooting and testing, so don’t make the same changes to anything outside of your lab.

If you followed the previous blog NSX-T: Deploy NSX-T Manager 2.5 with OVFtool you should have NSX-T Managers deployed.

There’s a few more things we have to configure within NSX-T Manager like:

• Add a compute Manager (when using vCenter)
• Create IP Pools
• Create Transport Zones
• Create Profiles - Uplink & Transport Nodes
• Configure Host Transport Nodes for NSX
• Deploy Edge Transport Node
• Create Edge Cluster
• Create Segments
• Create T0 gateway
• Create T1 gateway
• Static routes

If you have the NSX-T Manager OVA on a fileshare or web server you can deploy it from the vCenter GUI, or use any other deployment tool like OVFtool.

Using OVFtool to deploy NSX-T Manager is a great way to deploy a quick and repeatable configuration. It also helps to document the configuration options.