Intro
Welcome to Part 8 of the AVI/ALB Lab In the previous post, we configured our NSX-T cloud.
In this post we’ll cover setting up the SE group settings.
What is an SE group?
A Service Engine (SE) group contains the definitions on how SE’s that are part of the group will be sized, placed and configured for HA. Every cloud that you create will have at least one SE group options in the group will vary based on the type of cloud that it is configured in. SE’s can only be in one SE group and each group is an isolated domain. SE resources within an SE group may be moved around to accommodate virtual services, but SE resources are never shared between SE groups.
Multiple SE groups may exist within a cloud. A newly created virtual service will be placed on the default SE group, though this can be changed via the VS > Advanced page while creating a VS via the advanced wizard. To move an existing virtual service from one SE group to another, the VS must first be disabled, moved, and then re-enabled.
SE groups provide data plane isolation; therefore moving a VS from one SE group to another is disruptive to existing connections through the virtual service.
Configuration
I’m going to edit the default SE group in my NSX-T cloud.
Navigate to Infrastructure, Service Engine Group Select the NSX-T cloud from the dropdown then click the pencil icon to edit the Default-Group
On the Basic Settings page we can adjust the HA mode the VS Placement across SEs the number of Virtual Services per SE as well as the max number of SE’s CPU Memory disk space etc. I’ll get into these settings later but for now just click the Advanced tab
The bit we are interested in is the Placement Scope section, we need to define the vCenter, SE Folder (which we created earlier) and optionally the host and Storage settings click on + Add vCenter
Select the vCenter from the dropdown list, this is technically the only required setting if you allowed the avi user on the VC to have the folder permission globally in other words if you just created a single role with the global and folder permissions then the SE’s will be allowed to be placed on the root of the VC directory. Since I am following the best practise I need to specify the SE Folder. You can select which hosts you want the SE’s to be deployed to by changing the Host Scope to Host and then Include or Exclude hosts, you can also do the same with the Storage. In the screenshot below I have allowed the SE’s to be placed on any host in this case it will one of the two compute hosts, but I have limited the allowed storage to just one of the two available datastores.
Click Save
That’s all that is needed.
AVI/ALB NSX-T Lab Part 9: – Management and VIP Network Allocation