I discussed the supported design for NSX ALB integration with the VMware Cloud Director in the first post of this series. Part 2 of this series described how to enable “Load Balancing as a Service” in VCD.
If you missed any of the previous posts in this series, I recommend that you read them using the links provided below.
1: NSX ALB Integration with VCD – Supported Designs
This blog post is focused on implementing the Dedicated Service Engine Groups design.
The below diagram shows the high-level overview of Dedicated SEG in VCD.
In this design, the management network of Service Engine (eth0) is attached to the tier-1 gateway dedicated for NSX ALB management and provisioned by the service provider. When a Virtual Service is created by the tenant, a logical segment corresponding to the VIP network is automatically created and gets attached to the tenant’s tier-1 gateway. The SE uses the VIP interface to route to the backend servers when a load-balanced application is accessed.
At this point, it is assumed that a Service Engine Group has been created in NSX ALB and the Controller is already integrated into VCD.
SEG Import Type
Service Engine Groups are created in the NSX ALB Console in the default admin tenant. The SEGs are then imported into VCD by the Service Provider. The supported import types are:
- Shared: In this mode, the Service Engine is shared across tenants.
- Dedicated: In this mode, each tenant has dedicated Service Engines for the load-balanced traffic.
Import SEG into VCD
To import an SEG in VCD, login to VCD using the system admin account and navigate to Resources > Infrastructure Resources > NSX ALB > Service Engine Groups, and click on the ADD button.
Select the NSX-T cloud with which the SEG will be associated and provide a display name for the SEG in VCD.
Choose the Reservation Model as dedicated and from the available SEGs, select the appropriate group.
The HA mode and max virtual services depend on the settings configured on the SEG in NSX ALB.
Enable Load Balancing Service for Tenants
Tenants won’t be able to consume the SEGs imported in VCD until Service Provider enables load balancing on the tenant’s org.
To enable load balancing for a tenant, navigate to Resources > Cloud Resources > Edge Gateways and locate the Edge Gateway of the tenant.
Click on the Tenant’s Edge Gateway and navigate to the Load Balancer > General Settings and Edit the settings.
Activate Load Balancing using the toggle button. You can use the default Service Network Specification.
Once the load balancing is enabled for a tenant, the tenant’s org admin imports the SEG to the edge gateway.
To import the SEG, locate the Edge Gateway and Under Load Balancer settings, select Service Engine Groups, and click on the ADD button.
Select the SEG that belongs to the tenant and click on the Save button.
The org users then consume the SEG by creating load balancing constructs. I will demonstrate load balancing in a later post of this series.
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