We have been using NSX-v with vSphere 6.5 for several years. We are trying to deploy a new greenfield solution using vCenter 7.0, vSphere 7.0, and NSX-T 3.1 on a single cluster of 3 UCS blade servers. There will be a single vSphere Cluster hosting all VMs - management, normal VM workloads, NSX-T Edges, etc. We plan on using VDS on the ESXi Transport hosts rather than N-VDS. Our UCS blade server profiles are configured with 10 NICs. Eight are currently used for management, vMotion, storage and VLAN based VM traffic. The last two will be dedicated to an additional VDS for use for VM overlay TEP traffic, Edge TEP traffic and Edge VLAN uplinks to the physical routers.
I have reviewed VMware documentation, Udemy courses on NSX-T, the VMware NSX-T 3.0 ICM course and numerous blog postings. I have yet to find clear and concise instructions for how to setup a collapsed cluster using distinct overlay VLANs for ESXi hosts and Edge VMs and with multiple uplinks per Edge.
This blog (https://www.networkbachelor.com/nsx-t-series-part-13-nsx-t-edge-deploy-part-2/) has a diagram of pretty much what we are trying to do but it doesn't go into the details of how exactly to setup the Uplink Profiles, the Transport Zones, the Transport Node Profiles, whether to use Quick Start mode or not, setting up the Edges with the right bits attached to the right things. Its really quite frustrating.
If I try setting up Edge Nodes using Fabric->Nodes,Edge Transport Nodes I end up with Edge VMs with 3 NICs attached (1 for management and two for uplinks -- nothing is attached for TEP use). If I try setting up Edge Nodes using QuickStart->Prepare NSX Transport Nodes, I end up with Edge VMs with four NICs attached (1 for management, 1 for TEP and two for uplinks).
Is there any simple to follow comprehensive documentation anywhere for NSX-T 3.x that covers setting up a collapsed cluster for use with NSX-T, deploying the Edge Nodes, then setting up an initial T-0 and T-1 gateway for connectivity to VMs on NSX-T Segments?
Thanks,
D G
