Automation Leveraging NSX REST API Guide

I also published this blog post about automation leveraging the NSX REST API on the VMware NSX Network Virtualization Blog on June 21, 2016. The full blog post is provided below and can also be seen on the VMware NSX Network Virtualization Blog site.

VMware NSX Network Virtualization Blog
Title: Automation Leveraging NSX REST API Guide
Author: Humair Ahmed
Date Published: June 21, 2016

Check-out the new Automation Leveraging NSX REST API Guide. A few people on the VMware NSX Technical Product Management team worked on this document including myself. Feel free to share any feedback.

Thanks to all the contributors and reviewers of this document. A brief overview of the guide is provided below.

VMware has helped transform the data center landscape by introducing virtualization technologies for compute, storage, and networking. By replicating traditional hardware constructs in software, VMware allows for not only efficiency in hardware utilization, improved resiliency, lower costs, but also automation at a completely new level that has never been possible before. Gone are the days of hardware specific APIs, screen/CLI scraping and vendor-specific tool sets that would have to be stitched together to create a complete solution.

VMware NSX provides a RESTful API service via NSX Manager that can be consumed in several ways. The NSX REST API can be consumed directly via a tool/library such as cURL or a REST Client like Postman, via multiple popular programming languages, and via orchestration cloud management tools. Popular programming languages such as Python, PowerShell, Perl, Go, and Java have REST client libraries which can easily be utilized to consume the NSX REST API. This means that elaborate workflows and complete systems/portals can be created to provide custom automation, management, and monitoring capabilities.

Tools such as VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) or programming language frameworks like Ansible can also be used to create advanced workflows for NSX. To see additional details and examples see the Automation Leveraging NSX REST API Guide.

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