ftallet2's Posts

This document attempts to describe the use cases, the configuration, the redundancy model and the design scenarios related to the NSX-T edge bridge. Even if we're talking about a 30 page white paper on a very specific topic, I can already see some few areas missing coverage. However, I think this is already useful enough to be shared to the world. Let me know you feedback on clarity. I'm more interested in making sure this is easy to understand than expanding the scope of this piece at that stage. Thanks and regards, Francois Tallet @ vmware Jan 15th 2021: updated for 3.1 (CLI changes)  

After presenting a session introducing the N-VDS (CNET1582US/BE) at VMworld this year, I was approached by some attendees who could not believe that the demo showing an example of NSX-T installation was real: they had struggled installing NSX and this looked too simple! NSX install on ESXi can relatively straightforward and fast. However, I admit there are quite a few concepts to understand, and quite a few ways of doing this incorrectly. This document is trying to document the "happy path" for installing NSX-T on ESXi hosts. It also covers uninstall, as well as some recovery steps should something go wrong. I hope this will encourage you to try NSX-T, you don't need much to get started

Most NSX-T deployment examples on ESXi leverage a VSS/VDS with dedicated pnic(s) for the ESXi vmkernel interfaces. However, there is a way of consolidating all those vmknics onto the NSX-T N-VDS, thus removing the need for additional physical connectivity dedicated to a VSS or VDS. This is particularly important in cases where the ESXi host only has two physical uplinks. This paper is shows how to move vmknics and vmnics from VSS to N-VDS in this two-uplinks-only ESXi host scenario.