The Service Engine installation in write access mode is automatic.
Back-end Changes During NSX Advanced Load Balancer Service Engine Installation
In VMware write access cloud, where the Controller spawns or deletes Service Engine based on virtual service placement and scaling requirements, the Service Engine bring up involves the following steps:
Reserve the license units required for SE. The reservation can be seen in show license ledger details CLI command as escrow.
Spawn SE and allow it to boot up.
Service Engine boots up and then finally tries to register itself providing the reservation ID (escrow cookie).
The expectation is that SE should come up and consume reservation within 15 minutes and if there are any issues that is detected by resource manager process, then it cancels the reservation after 15 minutes.
However, if the reservation remains unconsumed for more than 15 minutes, such reservations are cleared by license manager process within the time range one - two hours.
If you want to cancel the reservation, then you can run HTTP GET on api/licensing/ledger/clear/reservation. This API cancels the reservation, it does not impact SE boot-up, only that there will not be any reservation and if multiple SE’s comes up, then the first SE that registers gets precedence.
Tagging Virtual Machine
Starting with NSX Advanced Load Balancer 22.1.3, you can create the SE tags to provide the complete SE name.
Tags and Categories
Tags allow to attach metadata information to objects in the vSphere inventory to make it easier to sort and search for these objects.
A tag is a label that can be applied to the objects in the vSphere inventory. For example, when you create a tag, you assign that tag to a category. Categories allow you to group related tags together.
When you define a category, you can specify the following.
the object types for its tags, and
whether more than one tag in the category can be applied to an object.
You can assign or remove a tag by selecting the appropriate option in Tags & Custom Attributes.
Creating or Assigning a tag
You can create or assign tags as follows:
You need to create CATEGORY and TAG in vCenter.
Configure the SE Group or cloud in the Controller with custom tags where tag_key is selected as CATEGORY and tag_val is selected as TAG name. While creating the CATEGORY, it is recommended to select Many tags in Tags Per Object section to create tags that are not mutually exclusive. For more details on a tag category, see Create, Edit, or Delete a Tag Category.
Deleting a tag
When an SE get deleted, the object reference from the Tags object list in vCenter will automatically be removed.
However, Tags and Categories will still be present in vCenter. You need to manually delete these entities from vCenter when needed.
