New fling: Autopology - wysiwyg Designer for NSX

calendarMay 18, 2017 · 2 min read · NSX VMware  ·
Share on: linkedincopy

NSX is a very powerful network virtualization platform that allows the users to spin up large scale complex networks within seconds. For new users, the inventory-based interface that NSX exposes might be a little overwhelming. To ease the network creation process and the workloads’ attachment to such networks we present ‘Autopology’ – a graphical interface aimed to complement NSX and simplify workflows for customers and people stepping into the realm of virtual networking.

What Autopology Offers

  • Drag and drop interface to create logical networks so that the customers can design topologies tuned to their environments
  • Single click replication of sections of topologies
  • Ability to view the drawn network for future reference
  • Ability to easily navigate to NSX Manager interface to further customize the logical entities as and when needed
  • Ability to attach multiple VMs to logical entities. VMs could be residing on ESX or KVM hypervisors

Benefits

  • One cohesive view to design logical networks as opposed to filling out tedious forms across multiple views
  • Intelligent defaults help bypass advanced configuration for network objects
  • Rapid scaling of logical networks
  • Inventory of workloads across multiple hypervisors
  • Combine compute and network in a single view

Requirements:

VMWare Products
Autopology Server

Ubuntu 16.04 with the following packages installed:

  • apt-get install python-pip
  • apt-get install python-libvirt
  • apt-get install libssl-dev
  • apt-get install python-dev
  • apt-get install libffi-dev
Autopology Web Interface
  • Chrome, the latest version from Google
  • Firefox, version 35 and above from Firefox

Installation instructions

  1. Download the autopology-1.0.20170421-py2-none-any.whl package from this page on the Ubuntu 16.04 machine
  2. Install the package on Ubuntu 16.04 machine using the command:``` pip install autopology-1.0.20170427-py2-none-any.whl l
  3. Start Autopology Server using the command:``` autopology.server
  4. Follow the prompts to complete server startup
  5. Post install, use the Autopology Web Interface URL, typically, https://: to design and deploy NSX topologies.

For detailed instructions, please refer to the Autopology Installation & Quick Start Guide.