Recently one of my customers changed naming convention of vCloud Director Edge Gateways. He renamed them in vCloud Director however the names of virtual machines backing the Edge Gateways stayed the same. Also the names in vShield Manager or NSX Manager did not change. He quickly found out that there is no way to change the name in the GUI of vShield/NSX Manager. This is unfortunate especially for troubleshooting purposes.
Just today I saw the same question internally on our mailing list and the answer is that you can rename the Edge via API. Just GET the particular edge configuration and PUT it back with the changed name. As I recently wrote Powershell scripts that leveraged NSX API I quckly modified it and created two functions – RenameEdgeV5 and RenameEdgeV6.
They both rename the Edge, however only the first one works with vShield Manager. (EDIT 11 June 2015: Unfortunately vShield Manager does not allow renaming of Edges. You will get following error: Edge name cannot be updated. Specified name … does not match … Error code 15013.)
When using NSX Manager you have to use the one that matches the Edge version. The legacy Edges deployed by vCloud Director are version 5. The new NSX Edges are version 6. The API calls to retrieve the Edge info and change it are very similar one uses api 3.0 the other api 4.0.
Here are the scripts:
function RenameEdgeV5 {
<#
.SYNOPSIS Renames vShield Edge
.DESCRIPTION Renames vShield or NSX legacy v5 Edge
.NOTES Author: Tomas Fojta
.PARAMETER NSXManager
The FQDN or IP of your vShield or NSX Manager
.PARAMETER Username
The username to connect with. Defaults to admin if nothing is provided.
.PARAMETER Password
The password to connect with
.PARAMETER EdgeId
.EXAMPLE
PS> RenameEdge -NSXManager nsxmgr.fqdn -Username admin -Password password -EdgeId EdgeId -Name newname
#>
[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true,Position=0)]
[String]$NSXManager,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$false,Position=1)]
[String]$Username = "admin",
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[String]$Password,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[String]$EdgeId,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[String]$Name
)
Process {
### Ignore TLS/SSL errors
add-type @"
using System.Net;
using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates;
public class TrustAllCertsPolicy : ICertificatePolicy {
public bool CheckValidationResult(
ServicePoint srvPoint, X509Certificate certificate,
WebRequest request, int certificateProblem) {
return true;
}
}
"@
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::CertificatePolicy = New-Object TrustAllCertsPolicy
### Create authorization string and store in $head
$auth = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($Username + ":" + $Password))
$head = @{"Authorization"="Basic $auth"}
$HealthRequest = "https://$NSXManager/api/3.0/edges"+"/"+$EdgeId
$s = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $HealthRequest -Headers $head -ContentType "application/xml" -ErrorAction:Stop
[xml]$sxml = $s.Content
$sxml.edge.name = $Name
$r = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $HealthRequest -Method Put -Headers $head -ContentType "application/xml" -Body $sxml.OuterXML -ErrorAction:Stop
return $r.StatusCode
function RenameEdgeV6 {
<#
.SYNOPSIS Renames NSX Edge
.DESCRIPTION Renames NSX Edge
.NOTES Author: Tomas Fojta
.PARAMETER NSXManager
The FQDN or IP of your NSX Manager
.PARAMETER Username
The username to connect with. Defaults to admin if nothing is provided.
.PARAMETER Password
The password to connect with
.PARAMETER EdgeId
.EXAMPLE
PS> RenameEdge -NSXManager nsxmgr.fqdn -Username admin -Password password -EdgeId EdgeId -Name newname
#>
[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true,Position=0)]
[String]$NSXManager,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$false,Position=1)]
[String]$Username = "admin",
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[String]$Password,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[String]$EdgeId,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[String]$Name
)
Process {
### Ignore TLS/SSL errors
add-type @"
using System.Net;
using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates;
public class TrustAllCertsPolicy : ICertificatePolicy {
public bool CheckValidationResult(
ServicePoint srvPoint, X509Certificate certificate,
WebRequest request, int certificateProblem) {
return true;
}
}
"@
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::CertificatePolicy = New-Object TrustAllCertsPolicy
### Create authorization string and store in $head
$auth = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($Username + ":" + $Password))
$head = @{"Authorization"="Basic $auth"}
$HealthRequest = "https://$NSXManager/api/4.0/edges"+"/"+$EdgeId
$s = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $HealthRequest -Headers $head -ContentType "application/xml" -ErrorAction:Stop
[xml]$sxml = $s.Content
$sxml.edge.name = $Name
$r = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $HealthRequest -Method Put -Headers $head -ContentType "application/xml" -Body $sxml.OuterXML -ErrorAction:Stop
return $r.StatusCode
} # End of process
} # End of function
Usage example:
vSphere Client recent task activity:
And NSX Manager Edge Gateway view.
Tom Fojta's Blog 