Audio transcript: Static IP Address Management in Navisite Cloud Director (NCD)

Hello everyone, and welcome. My name is Hannah Warren and I'm here today for Navisite, giving a brief demonstration of our Navisite Cloud Director or NCD platform, which you can access through the Proximity login portal.

Quick note about today's tutorial: this is a general level tutorial with our product in its current iteration. If you have specific questions or issues with your environment please make sure you contact our customer service department. Also, for a more detailed tutorial please see our knowledge base, which is linked on the screen and also in the video description below. And with that, we'll get started.

OK, so now that I’ve logged into Proximity; I’ve navigated to the vApp detail page for the vApp that we’re using in this demo, which is called VmIpManagement; and on the diagram for this vApp I can see that we have one network in this vApp and on that network we have one VM. We just created this VM a few moments ago using the default method of IP address assignment within NCD.

By default NCD assigns the next available IP from your static IP pool to a VM end that you create. What does that mean for you, and what is the static IP pool, you might be asking. Well, to get more information about that all I need to do is go to my network detail page. You can get there from this diagram. And at the network detail level, I can scroll down to IP Allocation, which is this heading on the page, and click the drop-down menu for IP addressing.

You'll see this green area here: this is your static IP pool. Right now .2 to .100 are available for NCD toassign to new VMs as they're created. And down here you can see the ranges is laid out for you in a list format. If you need to change it all you have to do is click that gear icon right there, create your new range, and click the green check mark to save your changes. We're not going to do that right now because we're more concerned with the address of the actual VM that's on the network so we’ll close that out and we'll take a look at the allocated IPS.

Right now I can see that my VM, the only VM on my network, has an address of .2 – which was at the time the next available or the first available IP in the pool that wasn't used yet. Now that we've discussed IP management using a static IP pool let's say that we have a special use case scenario. Let's say that for whatever reason this test VM needs to have a specific known IP address rather than the one that's assigned from the next in my IP pool sequence.

That's actually a pretty easy change to make. You'll use as a manual method of static IP assignment; and to get there and do that process from here is pretty easy. Click the Test_VM link. And you'll notice here once we got into our VM detail page that my VM is partially powered off. This means that it's been shut down, as it says here, but it hasn't been completely powered off. For us to be able to make any changes to the IP address we need to ensure that the VM is completely powered off, because in essence this is like pulling the plug; it disconnects it from the network, allows us to make changes, and then we start the VM back up again VMware will make the reconfiguration and the changes that we've made.

OK, so now that my VM is powered off I’m going to scroll down here at the VM detail page, and we're going to go underneath the Hardware heading and click Network Interfaces. This is the list of all of the NICs, or Network Interface Cards, associated with my VM. And I can see that right now my VM is living at .2 for some reason; that's important for us to change right now, so let's click on the gear icon right here to edit the network interface.

We land at the Edit Network Interface page, and we can see that right now the IP Allocation Method is using the static IP pool method, which of course as we mentioned means that NCD is going to the static IP pool and taking the next available IP address in that pool and assigning it to the VM. We don’t want that to be the case anymore, so we're going to click this drop down and say, now I want you to assign it manually: static IP address, manual. And now I've decided, let's say, that we want this VM to be at .99 – and it's going to be there from now on because it's a static IP address assignment.

To save my changes I can click Edit Network Interface. And you'll notice again it says powered off (I’m busy, I’m thinking). When that changes made you'll see . 99 show up here for the VM's NIC. There we go. So we've now reassigned the IP address for this VM; let's see if we can power it back on and do an “ifconfig” just to make absolutely certain that our changes were taking effect.

All right, so now that I’ve edited my NIC I’m going to scroll back to the top of my Test_VM detail page, and I'm going to turn the VM back on so that it can reconfigure. This process can take a few seconds. All right, we're powered on. So what I'm going to do is open up my console for this VM: there we go. OK, so we're going to log in: very good, success. And we're going to do a quick “ifconfig” just to see the status of everything actually made our changes. And you'll notice that our new address is now .99 – so our new configuration was a success! And what we're going to do is just close out of this.

And that wraps up this video installment. Thanks for tuning in to this demonstration in NCD. As always we’d appreciate your feedback. If you found this video helpful or have ideas for videos in the future we do source those from comments on our content, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts with us.

You can follow our YouTube channel for future videos, and there are 24x7 detailed demonstrations with screenshots and step by step how-to’s at our knowledge base: https://navisite.uservoice.com/knowledgebase.

Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.