VMware Cloud on AWS is making a switch to the underlying networking and security platform for the service. This move is being done in order to provide access to services such as distributed firewall, security groups, route-based VPN connections, and more. In order to accomplish this move, SDDCs will be transitioned from NSX-V to NSX-T.

More information about this update is available in the following blog post: VMware Cloud on AWS: Advanced Networking and Security with NSX-T SDDC

However, the big question which continued to come up during VMworld was: What NSX platform is my SDDC currently using?

Let’s take a look at how we can easily determine this using the VMware Cloud on AWS API!

NSXT Property

There’s a specific property we are looking for, and that’s named ‘nsxt’. This property can be found when retrieving information about an SDDC and is located in the ‘resource_config’ sub-section. The property is of a Boolean type, so it will either contain a value of true or false. A response of true indicates that the SDDC is using NSX-T. A response of false indicates that the SDDC is using NSX-V.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the methods we can use to retrieve this property’s status with Datacenter CLI.

Datacenter CLI

Another option to retrieve this information would be through Datacenter CLI. I would recommend performing this task in what’s known as ‘scripting mode’, instead of the ‘interactive mode’, so we can make use of some additional tools to handle the formatting. Following suite with our 1 host deployment script, we’ll make use of JQ.

We can use the following code to list out our SDDC names and the ‘nsxt’ property:

# Obtain Org information and store the ID in a variable
ORG\_JSON=$(dcli +vmc com vmware vmc orgs list +formatter json)
ORGID=$(echo $ORG\_JSON | $JQ -r '.\[0\].id')

# Obtain SDDC information and output only the Name and NSXT properties 
SDDC\_JSON=$(dcli +vmc com vmware vmc orgs sddcs list --org $ORGID +formatter json)
echo $SDDC\_JSON | jq -r '.\[\] | { Name: .name, NSXT: .resource\_config.nsxt}'

The output should look a bit like the following: DCLI - Retrieving the NSXT Property

Summary

VMware Cloud on AWS is a service which is continuously evolving and updating in order to provide those consumers with the latest and greatest features. One of the latest examples of which is the transition from NSX-V to NSX-T. This move is being done in order to provide access to services such as distributed firewall, security groups, route-based VPN connections, and more. This blog post covered how we can use the numerous methods available to poll the VMware Cloud on AWS API in order to obtain whether an SDDC is using NSX-V or NSX-T.

More information about this transition is available in the following blog post: VMware Cloud on AWS: Advanced Networking and Security with NSX-T SDDC