Help with designing incredibly simple single ESXi host NSX-T 3.0 Deployment

[MasterWayZ]

Hi,

I wanted to give NSX-T 3.0 a go but I'm having trouble with setting it up and getting it to work.

To give you an idea for the environment, it's a single ESXi host with one physical switch (all of the NICs, it has 7, 6 are on the LAN and 1 is set aside for NSX-T though this can always be made more.).

There's an untagged VLAN 0, the main LAN used for management, and tagged VLAN 2. Which can be used by NSX-T if needed. And more can be added if needed.

I've yet to see a document on how to set the VLANs up correctly with the profiles and what to assign to the host vs. to the NSX-T Edge, so I wanted to ask here for help since I've been pulling my hair out for hours and am about to give up on it before I get bald.

Anyone who could give me a hand?

Thanks for reading!

[gfirth77 · Accepted solution]

Hi, Have you been able to deploy and login to the NSX manager? For mine I simply deploy NSX manager to the DVS i use for mgmt. Once that part is going you do the rest from within NSX manager GUI.

For the Edge I use the same Mgmt. VLAN for the edge node, but separate VLANs for the uplinks assigned to the T0. In my setup these are all VLANs tagged on the switch port to the hosts.

I was using 2.5 then rebuilt the lab using 3.0 My switch is using dot1q tag ports to the host NIC which are assigned to the N-VDS. My port groups use a VLAN ID, not VLAN 0. So I have a Mgmt. DVS port group set to vlan x.

2.5 to 3.0 now includes VRF support and Global NSX managers which is really nice.

If you have not played with NSX-T yet I would highly recommend you watch a couple of youtube videos to gain an understanding of the concepts with regards to N-VDS, Uplink profiles, Transport Zones etc.

I think is probably one of the best ones I can find.

TAM Lab 025 - NSX-T Lab Install - YouTube

Regards

Glenn

[MostafaElSayedF]

It's looking like you want to test only as 1 host not enough for production. try first to search and study about NSX-T. but if you have an issue in deploying nsx manager i think the only two things will make your setup failed is if the import failed due to resources or a distribution in the setup and usually you need to redeploy and u must fill all the options in proper way with high complex password because this is one of the failures.

I hope this answer your question and i hope that this become answer or helpful comment for you. also, for More details and more information just follow my blog http://www.syncgates.com.

[MasterWayZ]

Thanks for the replies.

Yes, it's for testing indeed, not for a production environment.

The NSX-T Manager is deployed, the issue I'm having is that the Tier 0 router cannot communicate with the main router on that VLAN.

These are my settings:

Host Transport Node (ESXi host) is on the overlay network and has its uplink profile set to VLAN 2 with a physical NIC attached that has access to VLAN 0 and 2 on the physical switch.

Edge Transport Node is on the VLAN and overlay network, and has its uplink profile set to VLAN 0, with the NIC that it is attached to on the virtual network that runs VLAN 2.

This VLAN 2 network has a pfSense VM on it on a standard port group, which is what the Edge Transport Node is connected to.

When I attach a Virtual Machine to the Tier 1 router that I attached to the Tier 0 router, the GENEVE tunnel is up with no issues. However, the pfSense router cannot communicate with the Tier 0 router. I do have a default route set as well as an IP, but no luck.

The uplink segment for the Tier 0 is VLAN, on VLAN 2.

It's a bit of an odd deployment, but I've had it working before. I just don't remember what things I did to get it to work.

I'm not the best at explaining things and if you do have any questions please let me know and I'll try to clear things up.

Thanks!

[MasterWayZ]

gfirth77​ thanks for linking the video!

I've followed the video and it 90% works now. I did the same as in the video except instead of creating my own transport zones I used the ones created by default with NSX-T. Creating my own transport zones and ensuring that the right N-VDS names are set, now it works.

I do have one last question. I wanted to configure DNS for a DHCP server on a segment, and the DNS server I want to use is located at 192.168.254.108, however according to the documentation (Configure DHCP on a Segment ), "DNS server IP addresses must belong to the same subnet as the subnet's gateway IP address."

How would this be set-up? I don't think I can set-up a DNS forwarder, I tried that but setting the DNS server IP to one within the subnet of the segment is not allowed.

Do you know how I would set this up?

EDIT: I got everything working now, thank you for the tips and for linking the video!

Thanks for your help!