Part 2: VMWare NSX-T Preparing Transport Nodes and Segments

 

 

Step 01 – Add vCenter server as compute Manager

Click on System – Fabric – Compute Managers – Add compute Managers – Provide vcenter details and click ADD.

 

Step 02 – Create IP Pools

Create 2 IP Pools one for TEP and another for Edge node TEP’s.

Click on Networking – IP management – IP address Pools – Add ip address Pool – Create VTEP IP Pool and EDGE IP Pool

• Provide Name
• Click on Set – Provide start and end ip and subnet details
• click save

Step 03 – Create Transport Zones & Profiles

Click on System – Fabric – Transport Zones – Add – Create 2 Transport zones – 1 for overlay and another for vLan backed networks. In this post we are using the default ones created.

Create Transport Node Profile – This profile will be applied to all ESXi hosts while preparing the servers for overlay – Click on Profiles – Transport node profiles – Add profile

Provide below details and click add

• Name for transport node profile
• select VDS – from ESXi 7.0 onwards VDS has NVDS features so no NVDS required
• Select Mode standard
• Name – select vcenter added earlier then select the Distributed switch which has uplinks and needs to be used for overlay.
• Under transport zone – select both overlay and vlan transport zone
• uplink profile – create a new uplin kprofile with no of uplinks
• IP assignment – select the ip pool and the pool name created earlier
• do the uplink mapping
• click add

Step 04 – Prepare ESXi Hosts

Click on Fabric – Nodes – select vcenter – click on actions – prepare esxi hosts and select the transport node profile created before.

It will take 5-10 mins to prepare the hosts.

Step 05 – Create Segments

Now we need to create segments – these are nothing but the portgroups or vLans used to connect our VM’s.

Click on networking – connectivity – segments – add segment.

Provide details as below.

• Segment Name : Web-servers-01
• Transport zone – overlay
• Subnet : 172.16.10.0/24
• scroll down and click save.
• segments will be connected with gateway in later phase.

similarly create a segment for app and others as required.

Scroll down and click save

Click on No and continue.

Step 06 – Attach VM’s to Segments

Edit the Web and app servers and attach them to respective networks.

Attach the VM’s to the segments as shown below and try ping each other to test L2 connectivity.

L3 doesn’t work at this point ( web-app). this will be covered in next post.

Hope this post is useful.