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7007VM7007
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Minimum requirements for NSX

I am about to start learning NSX and I was wondering, can I install NSX in a home lab setup that has only one cluster with two hosts? What I've read so far about NSX states that you need a management cluster and two compute clusters. Obviously I only have a single cluster so will this be an issue?

This is purely for learning in a home lab setup. My home lab cluster has 256GB of memory so I have more than enough resources to run NSX but I just wanted to know how strict the minimum requirements are for installing NSX when it comes to the number of clusters needed.

Thanks.

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lucasitteam
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I suggest you use nested virtualization.

256 GB RAM is very good configuration. I also assuming you have good number of cores

You should have minimum two clusters

1. Management & Edge cluster (3 nodes)

2. Compute cluster (2 node is sufficient)

Above is more than sufficient

Distribute a workload in following way.

All Tier 1 VMs deploy on physical ESXi host, Tier 2 VMs as Nested ESXI

Tier 1

1. vCenter (2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM)

2. NSX Manager (4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM)

3. Domain Controller (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM)

4. 3 x ESXi host for Edge cluster (2/4 vCPU, 8/16 GB RAM)

5. 2 x ESXi host for COmpute cluster (2/4 vCPU, 8/16 GB RAM)

Tier 2

NSX Edge

DLR VM

Compute Cluster

Small Linux VMs

Windows 2003 VM

I strongly recommend to start with Hands on lab. You can learn stuff there and then think about implementing lab.

You can review this link ->http://virtualinsanity.com/index.php/2016/12/11/rapidly-clone-testdevlab-with-vra-and-nsx/

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7007VM7007
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for the reply.

Each of my ESXi hosts has 8 physical cores and 128GB of RAM so the cluster has 256GB of memory in total and 16 cores (giving 33Ghz of CPU).

I wanted to avoid nested virualisation as my setup is just not configured with this in mind.

Can I still learn NSX in a single cluster configuration considering it is a home lab for learning?

I plan on getting a third host but that will probably be early next year.

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lucasitteam
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Can I still learn NSX in a single cluster configuration considering it is a home lab for learning?

Yes it is possible. I don't see any challenges. You would have to deploy two controller nodes. I think this is fine since you are just learning it. I might be wrong, certain scenarios like failover/failback of services might be limited.

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RaymundoEC
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi there Sir,

that works just fine, just as a suggestion to get like all the features and the sweet taste of NSX try to think for a moment in a  virtual lab, so for instances one ESXi host can be a complete virtual data center with 3 clusters, and the other one can be other virtual Datacenter, then you can have complex things like xVC NSX and be able to check at any level of connectivity point (talking about overlay packets) what is going on, then, for instance, you want to try a DR or a DA you can add more features like vSphere Replication or Site Recovery manager and so on so forth, so with 2 ESXi hosts in my opinion due to you are not going to have a big footprint from vSphere and NSX only I would say you will have idle times for your CPUs and Memory than squeezing them for your own good.

my two cents

regards

+vRay
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Techstarts
Expert
Expert

may be to add to Lucas, you can't do Cross VC which is requirement for VCP-NV. But there are excellent pre-built labs for it.

With Great Regards,
vKopp
Contributor
Contributor

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Nick_Andreev
Expert
Expert

You would have to deploy two controller nodes.

One, to be exact. You can have either one or three.

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