PART 1

This is the 2nd in a series of posts covering VCF 5.1 On VxRail 8.0.200. The following detailed post provides an example walkthrough covering the process of:

  • Deploying a NSX Edge Cluster for MGMT WLD
  • Deploying Application Virtual Networks(AVN)s for MGMT WLD

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 edge gateways having being deployed in the management WLD as a pre-requisite. The following steps detail how to deploy an NSX Edge cluster followed by deploying AVNs leveraging SDDC Manager automation. Required details for the deployment include the usual:

  • DNS entries
  • FQDN
  • IP Addresses (NSX edge transport nodes have static TEP IP addresses e.g 10.1.8.x)
  • BGP autonomous system number (ASN)
  • 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.

Go to 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 NSX Edge Cluster from vCenter & NSX UI & Dell Switch CLI.

Useful switch cli examples:

  • show running-config bgp
  • show ip bgp summary
  • show ip bgp
  • show ip bgp neighbors
  • show ip bgp neighbors 192.1.6.1
  • show ip bgp neighbors 192.1.6.1 advertised-routes

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 Edge Network Topology

The following depicts the architectural view from within NSX 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:

Using PowerVCF to retrieve the configuration details:

NOTE: Get-Command -Module PowerVCF -Name Get*

In Part 3 I will walkthrough the deployment of Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM).

Note: this is an example for reference only please use the VxRail installation procedures provided by Dell.

Thanks for reading!

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