Intro
Welcome to Part 2 of the NSX-T 3.0 Lab Federation Series.
In the previous post, we covered the basic lab setup, in this post we will be deploying our Global Manager.
With the release of NSX-T 3.0 one of the major additions was NSX Federation giving us true Multisite deployment capabilities.
In this post I’ll be deploying the Global NSX Manager which is used to configure and manage the configuration across sites.
The deployment process is very similar to that of the NSX Manager with just two changes the option to select the deployment as a Global NSX Manager and the configuration of a Site name.
What is a NSX-T Federation?
Take a look a my post on NSX-T Multisite vs Federation for more detail on NSX-T Federation.
Essentially it allows us to configure and Manage our NSX-T deployments across multiple sites, this gives us the functionality to have distributed networking and security across those sites as we had in fact better than we had in Cross vCenter NSX with NSX-V.
Pre-reqs
Firstly as always make sure you have added the Global NSX-T manager to your DNS server with forward and reverse lookup,
Download the OVA file from the VMware website you’ll need the full OVA file and not the upgrade bundle for this.
Make sure your environment meets the following requirements.
- There must be a latency of 150 ms or less between locations with the Federation environment.
- The Global Manager and all Local Managers must have NSX-T Data Center 3.0 installed.
- The required ports must be open to allow communication between the Global Manager and Local Managers.
- There must be connectivity without NAT between the following:
- Global Manager and Local Manager.
- Local Manager and remote Local Manager.
- Edge node RTEP and remote Edge node RTEP.
- Global Manager supports only Policy Mode. Federation does not support Manager Mode.
The current supported hypervisors are
vSphere 6.5 u2 through to 7.0
RHEL KVM 7.6, 7.7
CentOS Linux KVM 7.6, 7.7
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server KVM 12 SP3, 12 SP4
Ubuntu KVM 16.04, 18.04.2 LTS
I use vSphere in my lab.
NSX-T can be deployed onto standalone hosts or hosts managed by vCenter.
The build
Login to your vSphere host or vCenter server, for my lab we are using the vCenter to deploy and manage the appliance.
Right click the cluster and select ‘Deploy OVF Template’
Select the Local file option and click UPLOAD FILES
Select the ova file
Click NEXT
Enter the VM Name and select the Location then click NEXT
Select the Compute resource in my case I just select the Lab cluster, click NEXT
Review the details then click NEXT
Select the deployment size for the Global NSX Manager a Small size is fine, click NEXT
Select the datastore and disk format then click NEXT
Select the network, NEXT again.
Enter the login credentials for the System Root, the CLI admin and the Audit accounts these need to be complex and at least 12 characters then scroll down.
Enter the Hostname, then from the drop-down menu select NSX Global Manager, enter the NSX Site Name the Default Gateway IP, the Global NSX Manager IP and Subnet Mask, scroll down.
Enter the DNS, Domain, NTP and optionally enable SSH and Root SSH logins. The rest of the settings can be left, click NEXT
Review the changes then click FINISH
Just like the NSX Manager deployment the CPU reserves MHz and all RAM, for my lab I’m going to remove the reservations and play with the CPU and RAM resources as much as I can to save resources. DO NOT do this for a production deployment as VMware will not support you!
With that we are finished with the Global Manager Deployment and we can go ahead and power on the VM.
In the Next post I’ll be configuring the Global NSX Manager.
Part 3 NSX-T 3.0 Lab: Global Manager & Locations Setup