Intro
Welcome to Part 3 of the NSX-V Lab Series. In the previous post, we covered the NSX-V Manager appliance deployment.
In this post we’ll cover the initial configuration of that appliance.
With the NSX-V manager powered on we need to connect to it’s web interface so open a browser and connect https://NSX-Manager.FQDN in my case https://NSXVMan01.lab.local
Login with the username admin and the password you set during the deployment. Until we link it with the SSO and vCenter we can’t use our vSphere credentials to login.
Once logged in you will be the screen below.
The first thing we want to do is to check that the services have started to ensure the NSX Manager appliance is running correctly.
Click ‘View Summary’
The summary page shows… that’s right a summary of the appliance with CPU, Memory and Storage usage along with appliance info and the services.
The warning at the top on my system is because I changed the CPU to less than the recommended.
You’ll notice 5 services with the NSX Universal Synchronization Service in a Stopped state, this is normal as we have not configured the Manager as a primary yet so this service won’t start until we do so later.
From here click the Manage tab
The first thing I always do is to set the Domain Name, select the Network Setting on the left pane and then click ‘Edit’ in the top right corner.
Add the domain name and click ‘OK’
The other options we will configure later, for now select ‘NSX Management Service in the left settings pane then click ‘Edit’ in the Lookup Service URL section.
Or you can get to the pane from the home page by clicking the ‘Manage vCenter Registration’ link
Enter the lookup host this will be your PSC or in my case the vCenter as it has the PSC embedded.
Enter an SSO username and password, I’m using the default admin account for simplicity and I’ve not yet linked SSO to the AD. In a production environment you should create a service account and use that instead.
Click ‘OK’
Click ‘Yes’ to accept the certificate.
Once connected the status will change to green.
Click ‘Edit’ on the vCenter Server section
Enter the vCenter the vCenter username and password
Do not tick ‘Modify plugin script download location’, unless the NSX Manager is behind a firewall type of masking device.
This option allows you to enter an alternate IP address for NSX Manager. Note that putting NSX Manager behind a firewall of this type is not recommended. Click ‘OK’
Click ‘Yes’ to proceed with the certificate
Once connected the status will show green.
At this stage I reboot the appliance this is needed as I set the domain name earlier. if you didn’t then you do not need to reboot.
If you switch to your vCenter web client you will notice alarms being created in the recent tasks these are the NSX alarms being added.
Finally log out of the vCenter web client and login again otherwise you will not see the NSX Manager. Note that you Must login with the user that you used to register the NSX Manager with vCenter. This is currently the only user that will have access at this stage.
Once logged in click the Home button and you will see the Networking & Security option. Select it.
This will take you to the Dashboard where we have green indicators.
We are now ready to proceed wth the next step in the configuration.
NSX-V Lab Part:4 NSX-V License Configuration