In the first part of the NSX-T federation series, I discussed about architecture and components of the federation and also discussed some use cases. In this post, I will explain my lab topology before diving into the NSX-T Federation configuration.

I am trying to setup a federation between 2 sites in my lab and on both sites, I have already deployed the following:

• vSphere 7 (ESXi & vCenter).
• vSAN for shared storage.
• NSX-T 3.0 Manager.
• NSX-T 3.0 Edges.

I have 4 ESXi hosts on each site and each ESXi has 4 physical NICs. All 4 NICs are connected to a trunked port on ToR.

The networking architecture in my lab is a mix of VDS + N-VDS. 

2 NICs from each host are participating in routing regular datacenter traffic (Mgmt, vSAN & vMotion). 

The 2 other 2 NIC’s are connected to N-VDS and it carries overlay traffic only. 

For edge networking, I am using multi-tep, single NVD-S architecture. 

I am using the following VLANs in my lab:

Current State of NSX Configuration

Note: Both Site-A & Site-B NSX have the same configuration and thus I am only including config from one site of my lab.

1: Uplink profiles

Both Edge and Host uplink profiles have a default teaming as well as named teaming policies defined (for deterministic peering)

2: Transport Node Profile

The host Transport Node profile has both Overlay and VLAN transport zones added. 

3: Transport Zones

I have 3 transport zones in my lab. One for Edge uplink, one for ESXi host VLAN backed networks, and one overlay tz where both ESXi host and Edge nodes are added. 

Named teaming policies are associated with Host-VLAN-TZ and Edge-Uplink-TZ.

4: Edge Nodes

Each node is part of the Overlay-TZ and Edge-Uplink Transport Zones and uses the Edge Uplink Profile and static IP list for TEP networking.

The Edge interfaces are mapped to the Trunk port groups on the N-VDS.

Future State of NSX Configuration

In the next post of this series, I will demonstrate how to configure the NSX-T federation. The future state of NSX-T will look as shown in the below diagram.

And that’s it for this post.  

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