Evaluating NSX with VLAN's

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Second question regarding VLAN's:

Is there a reason that would preclude doing an evaluation deployment of NSX on VLAN's?

We have a whole C7000 enclosure with 16 G6 Blades and 4 Flex-10 switches, that we have retired from production. Before we deploy NSX "the right way," we would like to evaluate NSX on the old blades. I will have no problem creating Edge, Compute and Mgmt. clusters, but I couldn't truly do a Best Practices deployment of NSX without leaf/spine VLAN's (unless the boss wants to invest in 4 more HP Flex-10 switches for the evaluation!).

My idea: Create a "Spine VLAN", and 3 "Leaf VLAN's," all with MTU 1600 or better and begin to create our run-book documentation for NSX.

THX in Advance

[RussH]

Hi

Although the design guide puts a lot of weight to the leaf/spine network topology, its not the only "right" network architecture for NSX. A lot comes down to scale, a standard collapsed core/agg and access network that I see many enterprise networks still using would work just as well in a lot of scenarios and, provided you can create L3 SVIs on your Flex 10 switches - you could emulate this topology in your lab.

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You could absolutely create the "recommended" Leaf/Spine topology with blades and TOR switches, however I am more concerned with the  effect of switches which have VLAN's configured on them (even for reasons completely unrelated to NSX) being being purposed as "Spine."

Because of the way that NSX encapsulates the original frame and 802.1Q tag, I am concerned that a switch (TOR/Spine) on which VLAN's were utilized for trunking to other devices, would simply drop NSX traffic completely.

I appreciate the perspective that "the VMare way" is not the only "right" way - and they have hade some notable doozies of wrong ways to their recent credit as well.

THX

[nikhilvmw · Accepted solution]

Yes you can do a deployment with VLANS and it will work. You will be able to use Distributed firewall, Distributed routing (some design considerations apply here) and many other features. Ofcourse you will have to trunk the VLANs for the VM's to each host if you do not use an overlay.

Nikhil

/cc: NimishDesai. maxard66 rbudavari

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Got it!

Effectively, Trunking in place of Leaf/Spine architecture for evaluation.

Thank you!