VCF On VxRail 4.3 – Flexible AVN Day-N Operations

Prior to VCF 4.3 Application Virtual Networks(AVN)s including the NSX Edge Cluster and NSX network segments were deployed and configured during bring-up by Cloud Builder. Example of this process can be seen here in this example 4.2 bring-up:

VCF On VxRAIL 4.2 – Walkthrough (Part1: Bring-Up)

This deployment method has now changed in VCF 4.3 as per Release Notes Extract:

‘Flexibility in Application Virtual Networks (AVN):  Application Virtual Networks(AVN)s, which include the NSX Edge Cluster and NSX network segments, are no longer deployed and configured during bring-up. Instead they are implemented as a Day-N operations in SDDC Manager, providing greater flexibility.’

Application Virtual Networks (AVNs) are a requirement in order to support the deployment of the vRealize Suite set of products. AVNs are dependent on NSX-T edge gateways having being deployed in the management WLD as a pre-requisite. The following steps detail how to deploy an NSX-T Edge cluster followed by deploying AVNs leveraging SDDC Manager automation. Required details for the deployment include the usual DNS entries, FQDN, IP Addresses, BGP autonomous system number (ASN) and BGP passwords:

SDDC MANAGER AUTOMATED NSX-T EDGE DEPLOYMENT STEPS

Please reference the VMware prerequisites Before you deploy an NSX Edge cluster:

Prerequisites for an NSX Edge Cluster

Note re. Stretched Cluster: You cannot deploy an NSX Edge cluster on a vSphere cluster that is stretched. You can stretch an L2 uniform vSphere cluster that hosts an NSX Edge cluster.

Goto SDDC Manager UI Select Inventory > Workload Domains Click on the name of the Management domain. Select Actions > Add Edge Cluster:

On completion we can view the newly deployed and configured Edge Cluster from both the vCenter & SDDC Manager UI:

AVNs FOR MGMT DEPLOYMENT STEPS

Go to SDDC Manager UI Select Inventory > Workload Domains. Click on the name of the Management domain Select Actions > Add AVNs:

On completion we can view the newly deployed and configured AVNs from both the vCenter & SDDC Manager UI:

NSX-T Edge Network Topology

The following depicts the architectural view from within NSX-T manager for the Edge solution. The Tier-0 gateway provides routing to the external network while the Tier-1 connected to Tier-0 provides the N/S comms for the internal network.