ESG / DLR install location best practice

[derrellb]

Good Morning,

I am seeing conflicting answers as to the best location to install the ESG appliance.  If you have a 4 host Management cluster and a 4 node Edge and Compute cluster, Should the ESG be deployed to the Edge Compute cluster or Management?  I keep reading that it belongs to the Edge/Compute cluster, but the HOL's have them mostly in the MGMT cluster.

The VVD 4.3 document states " The shared edge and compute cluster is the first cluster in the virtual infrastructure workload domain and hosts the tenant virtual machines (sometimes referred to as workloads or payloads). This shared cluster also runs the required NSX services to enable North-South routing between the SDDC tenant virtual machines and the external network, and east-west routing inside the SDDC."

These services include the DLR and the ESG if I am reading it correctly.  But when you read the install guide, it shows the ESG and the DLR being stored in the MGMT cluster.

Its almost like it doesn't really matter where you put them as long as you have the resources to run them properly.

Thank you all for you advice!

William

[Sreec · Accepted solution]

Keeping it closer to workload is always a better approach as it ease connectivity options(Physical) and optimize traffic . Also do remember licensing part, the cluster has to be licensed if we are leveraging Edge/Control VM features , so a dedicated cluster means separate licenses and any kind of collapsed cluster have licensing benefits,but pretty much we are putting all eggs in one bucket and it will be a single failure domain and DRS rules will be on higher side based on number of tenants . So it does matter a lot were we are placing Edge/Control VM , HOL labs are not the right reference as the idea behind those labs are not to show best design approach rather it should be used for learning/testing any features.