Manage Networks and Interface Cards

Virtual networks are mapped to Virtual Distributed Port Groups in order to simplify and scale the network layer. If you already have access to one or many virtual networks in our environment you certainly feel more familiar with this section, if not, you are probably going to use our public network labeled VL-1584-VSS-PUBLIC, which is a DHCP enabled network and has no firewall enabled due to its nature as just being temporary and/or for testing.

We encourage all of our customers to have a custom network segment plumbed into our environment and that can be done first by contacting UofT Network Administration Tools and then providing the allocated segment and VLAN information to the VSS Team.

Virtual Networks

Virtual networks are unique in our environment and have to be differentiated by a unique identifier which in this case is the moref and stands for Managed Object Reference provided by vCenter server.

The vss-cli compute net command lists and obtains information regarding a specific virtual network you have permission on.

vss-cli compute net --help

Usage: vss-cli compute net [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  List available virtual networks.

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  get  Get given virtual network info.
  ls   list virtual networks.

List

Run vss-cli compute net ls to list available networks. Filter list by name using the option --filter-by/-f which is structured <field_name> <operator>,<value> and available operators are eq, ne, lt, le, gt, ge, like, in as follows:

vss-cli compute net ls -f name=PUBLIC

moref              name                description                  subnet          vlan_id    vms
-----------------  ------------------  ---------------------------  --------------  ---------  -----
dvportgroup-11052  VL-1584-VSS-PUBLIC  VSS Public network           142.1.216.0/23  1584       8

Info

Network info is available by vss-cli compute net get <name-or-moref> and provides basic information of a given network:

vss-cli compute net get dvportgroup-11052

moref               : dvportgroup-11052
name                : VL-1584-VSS-PUBLIC
description         : VSS Public network
subnet              : 142.1.216.0/23
vlan_id             : 1584
vms                 : 8
ports               : 32
admin               : Jose Manuel Lopez Lujan:000-0000-000:email@eis.utoronto.ca
client              : EIS
updated_on          : 2019-07-09 Tue 16:00:05 EDT

If you would like to get a list of your virtual machines available on a given network, use the vss-cli compute net get <name-or-moref> vms command. A list of uuid and name will be provided.

Virtual Machine Network Adapters

Virtual machine network interface cards backing is always a virtual network. Virtual machine NICs can be manage by vss-cli compute vm <name-or-uuid> <set|get> nic <unit>. Both get and set commands have similar arguments <unit> and set has a few properties to set as shown below:

List

Run vss-cli compute vm <name-or-uuid> nic to obtain a summary of your virtual machineconfigured network interface controllers. If you specify unit, the command will provide further information about the given unit as follows:

Update

Update a given virtual machine network interface card backing network by running vss-cli compute vm <name-or-uuid> nic up --network <name-or-moref> <unit> where uuid is the virtual machine UUID or name, unit is the nic labeled unit and moref is the virtual network identifier or name.

For example, if a given nic needs to be updated to network dvportgroup-0000, the command to use would be:

New virtual machines by default are provisioned using the vmxnet3 virtual adapter controller, designed to deliver high performance in virtual machines, but there are rare cases, the operating system does not include the vmxnet<2|3> drivers and the only way of getting them is online, a virtual machine network adapter should be modified with a more generic controller, such as e1000 or e1000e. To do so, run vss-cli compute vm set <name-or-uuid> nic up --adapter <e1000|e1000e> 1, for example:

After downloading OpenVM Tools which contain the drivers, change back to the vmxnet3 controller by performing the same bas operation but replacing e1000e with vmxnet3 as shown below:

Network interface connection states can also be updated to either connect or disconnect given the requirements. To perform a state change execute vss-cli compute vm set <name-or-uuid> nic up --state <connect|disconnect>:

Create

Create a new virtual machine network adapter by using the sub command mk and providing the backing network and type separated by the = sign in the option. i.e. <moref-or-name>=<nic_type>.

If no adapter is set, vmxnet3 is used.

For example:

Remove

Network adapter removal will ask for confirmation if flag -r/--rm is not provided. This is just as fail safe for mistakes that can happen and since nic removal is a one way action, which disposes the MAC address.

The following example demonstrates how to remove a nic with a confirmation prompt:

If your answer is N, the command will exit as shown above.

To override nic removal confirmation prompt, just add -r/--rm flag as follows: