Which cluster for placing DLR Control VM ?

[sijith]

Planning to have 3 clusters for a NSX design - Compute, Management (Infrastructure) and Edge clusters ? Edge Cluster willl have ESGs and Controllers.

Which is the recommended cluster for placing the  DLR control VM , and what design considerations should be made ?

Thank you,

Sijith

[grosas · Accepted solution]

The cluster placement is pretty much arbitrary as long as you have sufficient resources and the needed distributed port groups.  It might make sense to stick the DLR control VM with the edges since it is a type of edge appliance... Or it might make sense to move both your DLR and controller cluster into your Management cluster just based on the logical function..  that way the edge gateway data plane workloads haveore dedicated resources.

With cluster placement, one's chief concern should be the availability of resources for the workloads placed in the cluster.  Secondarily, maybe prioritize the proximity of very heavy related workloads? Other considerations are really just aesthetic.

Maybe it's a good idea to examine the way you carved out the clusters.  What was your goal behind that structure? Does that make sense?

[sijith]

The reason behind carving out seperate clusters is to keep the workloads with different charactersitics seperate as much as possible. I was also thinking of placing the DLR Control VMs on the Edge Cluster, to keep all NSX routing elements together within the same cluster.

[azharsoomro]

You can place the DLR Control VM in the Edge cluster, but please make sure that you have enough hosts in the Edge Cluster. Your ESG's ( edges) will also reside in the Edge Cluster and you need to avoid a scenario where your DLR Control VM and ESG resides on the same host. Make sure you have affinity rules created. which will prevent ESG and DLR Control VM on the same host.

[Richard__R]

There might also be some considerations if you're planning to use L2 bridging - as I understand it the bridging instance runs on the host where the active Control VM is...so you'd want to make sure that the VLAN to bridge to was presented to the hosts in the cluster in question (if you're restricting the span of external VLANs to your Edge cluster for instance).