testing NSX in nested environment?

[pirx666]

Hi,

would I gain much in testing NSX on bare metal, compared to 2 physical  servers? I'm thinking about a test setup in my company and don't know if there is really the need for hardware.

[smitmartijn]

Hi,

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: I'm going to assume that you meant "testing NSX on virtual machines, compared to 2 physical servers" - because of the nested environment title. NSX can work perfectly in a nested environment, as the VMware Hands on Lab environment shows. All NSX labs are dedicated environments per person, hosted on virtual ESXi hosts and you can pretty much test out all the NSX features.

I do it in my home lab as well; got a single big physical ESXi host and deploy virtual ESXi hosts and the NSX components on there.

Hope that helps,

[DominicFoley · Accepted solution]

Yep, Martijn is correct, I have a similar setup.  I do however, for performance reasons have my physical box in a separate cluster of just that one host and I put NSX manager and the controllers on it.  Then I just use the nested ESXi hosts for lightweight workload VM's, ESG's, dLR's etc...

If you don't want to muck around with virtual devices for iSCSI (e.g. virtual NetApp filer), you can just add vmdk's to your nested hosts and build a VSAN environment.

[pirx666]

Sounds good. I think I'll start with one physical host and a nested cluster/VMs.

[DominicFoley]

Please can you mark correct if answer helped.

Thanks

[pirx666]

Yeah, seems I can only mark one answer as correct which is a pity because both of you gave a helpful answer.

[pirx666]

Hi,

one follow up question. If I want to start with bare metal and test NSX, does it make any difference if I use 2 or 3 or x hosts? I know that there is the best practice to use separate Mgmt, Edge and Compute clusters, or to combine Mgmt and Edge and separate Compute. I found one page that recommends at least 4 hosts (but this was not for a lab setup).

[DominicFoley]

Sorry for delay.  I would add all your physicals together in a cluster and then create your nested environment from them.  With more physical hosts, you can create more nested hosts, which would work better for NSX.