I really like the new NSX Dashboard.  While it was added in v6.2.3,  there are some great enhancements included with  NSX v6.3.0.

The initial release of the Dashboard included System Overview, Host Preparation Status, Firewall Publish Status & Logical Switch Status.

v6.3.0 adds Backup Status, Edge Notifications & Service Deployment Status

In previous versions of NSX, an administrator would need to check multiple sections of the NSX UI to check the overall health of their NSX deployment.  Now this can be achieved in a single pane.

To view the dashboard,  login to the vSphere Web Client, Click Home, Networking & Security then the Dashboard icon on the left

Let’s review two use cases

1. NSX Manager Backup

Reviewing the dashboard,  we can quickly see that Backups are not configured in my environment. The dashboard shows that we do not have a regular backup scheduled and there is no last backup state.

The NSX Manager provides the management plane for NSX, so it is critical to backup this(and other NSX components) on a regular basis.  I won’t walk you through the process to configure NSX Manager backups, you can review the official documentation here

Let’s fast forward, I have now configured regularly scheduled NSX Manager backups, and the Dashboard has automatically updated to reflect this (note by default the Dashboard will refresh every 3 minutes)

2. Load Balancer Status

The second use case I’ll describe is for the Load Balancer.  Previously, if we wanted to check the status of members of a pool we would need to click on NSX Edges, double click the relevant Edge, select Manage, Load Balancer, Pools, highlight the relevant pool then click Show Pool Statistics.  Quite a few steps!  This has been simplified significantly with the Dashboard

We can see 1 alert against the load balancer

Let’s click on the alert, this will bring up additional information which if we hover over will bring up details of the alert.  In this case web1 changed to a down state

Now we can address the issue with the web1 and once resolved  the dashboard will automatically refresh and the error will be gone

A lot easier right!

• NSX