Headline:
Editing VM Interface Information
Description:
I know I have been on your cases about this because I feel you guys had this “almost perfectly right” in an earlier release, and then changed the GUI and in doing so, made this a nightmare for us now.
Most of our VMs are VNFs. Nokia, Cisco, Juniper, et al. Many of these do not run VMWare Tools on them, and the users log into a management IP once the VM comes up, access a CLI and configure up to a dozen nic interfaces on them (or they use a more automated approach like FortiManager or Terraform to do this configuration).
In the current release, the only field I can edit on a VMs interface once it comes up, is “Label”. And that’s handy, because in some cases we do in fact need to change the label from, say, “eth0” to “mgmt0” or “ge/000x” or whatever. But “label” should really be “name” because it is the name of the interface and we need that field to be just that - the name of the interface.
We used to have the ability to pick an interface and designate it as Primary. We don’t have that ability anymore. We used to consider Primary the “management interface”. What we need, is the ability to flip which interface is “Primary” and or, be able to add a tag/label to those interfaces that we can do things like, “management”, “control interface”, “failover interface” and these sorts of things.
It’s important so we can look at a VM when we don’t have access to the CLI, and figure out which interface is which.
We would also like the ability to key an IP in on the interface - which also used to be there, but you guys removed it and I can partially understand why (keying in an IP that does not reflect reality can certainly cause some issues). But, we have a bunch of VMs with 6-12 nics on them and the IPs are all blank because again, these are not running VMWare Tools and it’s certainly creating questions if not outright problems to not be able to see any addresses for those on the GUI - especially when we can’t get into the CLIs of these. We wind up having to go look at ARP tables and try to sleuth it out which is tedious.
Example/Use case(s):
(Replace with mock workflow/example/diagram when applicable)