Getting Started with NSX-T: Logical Routing and Switching: The Basic Principles of Building Software-Defined Network Architectures with VMware NSX-T

By Iwan Hoogendoorn

This primer on NSX-T helps you understand the capabilities and features of NSX-T, how to configure and manage NSX-T, and integrate NSX-T with other software. The book is the first in a series that will teach you the basics of NSX-T, which is an update of VMware's original software-defined networking (SDN) architecture aimed at making networks agile and flexible.

You will become familiar with VMware's software-defined data center (SDDC) ecosystem and how NSX-T fits in. You will understand NSX-T components such as NSX-T Manager, NSX-T Edge Transport Nodes, and NSX-T Host Transport Nodes. And you will learn how to install and configure network services such as East/West and North/South routing capabilities, layer two switching, VRF, EVPN, multicast, and layer two bridging.

The book provides best practices on how to configure routing and switching features, and teaches you how to get the required visibility of not only your NSX-T platform but also your NSX-T-enabled network infrastructure.  

The book explains security, advanced network features, and multi-site capabilities and demonstrates how network and security services can be offered across multiple on-premise locations with a single pane of glass for networking and security policy management. The interface with public cloud services is discussed and the book explains NSX-T operation in an on-premise private cloud and positioning and integrating NSX-T on a public cloud (off premises).

What You Will Learn 

• Understand how NSX-T fits in the VMware SDDC ecosystem
• Know what NSX-T is, its components, and the terminology used
• Install NSX-T
• Configure NSX-T network services
• Manage the NSX-T network

Who This Book Is For

Virtualization administrators, system integrators, and network administrators

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apress
• Release date: Feb 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781484267080

Book preview

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

I. HoogendoornGetting Started with NSX-T: Logical Routing and Switching https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6708-0_1

1. NSX-T and the VMware SDDC Ecosystem

Iwan Hoogendoorn¹  

(1)

Rotterdam, The Netherlands

This first chapter is a primer on how virtualization is used to create a software-defined data center (an SDDC) . One of the central pillars of the software-defined data center is the use of software defined networking (SDN). To better understand NSX-T (VMware’s SDN solution), it is best to first understand the components involved.

Software-Defined Data Center

SDDC is a collective term often used in IT when working with virtualization technology. With SDDCs, the data center infrastructure is virtualized, and with this virtualization, the compute, storage, and network infrastructure components are also virtualized.

With virtualization, it is possible to abstract the physical hardware into virtual pools and efficiently use your resources.

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Figure 1-1

Software-defined data center components

Because the data center components are now software-based (Figure 1-1), the configuration is agile, and parts and services can be provisioned faster than ever before with a physical data center infrastructure.

Clouds

The SDDC is typically used in a cloud, which is generally one or multiple SDDCs.

A private cloud is referred to as an SDDC infrastructure that is typically hosted on-premise (or on-site), and a public cloud is related to an SDDC infrastructure that is generally hosted off-premise (or off-site) somewhere remote, whether in a rented data center facility or a full, hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering.

Computer Virtualization

Compute virtualization is a way to abstract the hardware layer and create the option that multiple virtual components can share this hardware. The CPU and RAM can now be shared across multiple virtual machines, each having its operating system.

Before Virtualization

Before virtualization, physical hardware could typically host only one operating system (OS) at a time (Figure 1-2). Even though multiple applications could run on top of this available operating system instance, using the physical hardware was still inefficient.

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Figure 1-2

Before virtualization

Use Cases for Virtualization

Some of the main use cases to virtualize your physical compute resources are described in this section.

Efficient Use of Resources

The abstraction from the physical hardware through virtualization makes it possible to run multiple virtual servers while still using the same hardware. With this, resource usage can be shared but also consumed up to its full potential.

Security

With the possibility of creating multiple servers, it is also possible to segregate applications from each other. Let’s say you have a critical application that you need to run in a secured, isolated environment, where no other apps can negatively impact this application. You can choose to just run it inside another virtual server (virtual machine).

Automation

Using a virtualized server infrastructure built primarily with software, another use case is that you will save time (eventually resulting in cost savings) by automating complete application tiers consisting of multiple virtual machines.

After Virtualization

Figure 1-3 illustrates how virtual machines share the same physical hardware. Each virtual machine is capable of running its operating system, isolated from the other operating systems running on other virtual machines.

The hypervisor can be seen as the (software) translation layer between the physical and virtual components. A hypervisor mimics or emulates the available physical resources and then translates them into virtual components that the virtual machines can leverage.

Figure 1-3 shows the example of a so-called type-1 hypervisor. With a type-1 hypervisor, the hypervisor is the operating system. (This is different from the operating system that we use for a virtual machine.) This type of hypervisor is known for its performance, as there is no additional overhead of another operating system consuming other resources.

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Figure 1-3

After virtualization | Type 1

Examples of type-1 hypervisors currently in the market are VMware ESXi, Oracle VM, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM (Kernel-Based Virtual Machine), and Citrix Hypervisor (formerly known as Xen Server).

A type-2 hypervisor, also known as a hosted hypervisor, requires an operating system to run. This operating system can be Apple’s Mac OSX, Microsoft Windows, or a Linux distribution. The type-2 hypervisor will then run on top of this operating system, as you can see in Figure 1-4.

Because you are hosting a hypervisor and the virtual machines on top of this hypervisor, you need to take good care of your resources. There is a risk that the virtual machines will consume too much compute resources, which will result in your operating system holding everything together, and your overall system will become slow.

Examples of type-2 hypervisors currently in the market are VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion, and VirtualBox by Oracle VM.

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Figure 1-4

After virtualization | Type 2

Containers

Now that you know what a virtual machine is, I can tell you what a container is. A container is another virtualization level where you virtualize on the operating system level (Figure 1-5).

The idea is that you can develop and run your applications inside a container, and this container can be moved around quickly and efficiently when necessary, resulting in a boost of scalability. When the operating system, for whatever reason, is slow or not available, a new container can be brought up and used to host your application and your code can be back up and running in seconds. The container engine will take care of the container management part for you.

The rule of thumb here is that virtual machines isolate operating systems by using hypervisors, and containers isolate applications by using container engines (on top of an operating system).

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Figure 1-5

Traditional containers

In Figure 1-6, you can see that it is also possible to combine the usage of virtual machines and containers to have the best of both worlds.

Here, you can see that the container engine runs on top of the hypervisor, and this container engine can manage containers that are hosted inside different virtual machines.

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Figure 1-6

Virtual machines and containers

Storage Virtualization (Software Defined Storage | SDS)

With software-defined storage , it is possible to pool different physical storage devices from multiple sources and present it as one volume to the operating system and/or the application.

Network Virtualization (Software Defined Networking | SDN)

Software-defined networking (SDN), also often referred to as network virtualization (NV), is a way to abstract physical network resources and deliver network resources and services in a virtualized manner. Decoupling the network services from the underlying physical network allows a new form of scalability and flexibility.

Network services like routing, switching, VPN, and load balancing can now be offered on the software layer instead of the physical layer. This allows you to programmatically (automate) configure most of these services, resulting in less administrative overhead and faster provisioning with fewer errors than when manually provisioning network services.

VMware SDDC

VMware’s implementation of the software-defined data center is described in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1

VMware Implementation of the Software-Defined Data Center

VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere is a collection of two (software) products that let you virtualize the computing layer. These products are VMware ESXi Server and VMware vCenter Server.

VMware ESXi Server (Hypervisor)

VMware ESXi Server is VMware’s compute (type-1) hypervisor.

ESXi server (a lightweight piece of software) is installed on a physical server, where ESXi is the actual operating system and hypervisor in one (Figure 1-7).

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Figure 1-7

VMware ESXi hypervisor

VMware vCenter Server

vCenter Server is the management environment/piece of VMware vSphere. With the VMware vCenter Server, it is possible to perform the administration of all the ESXi servers in your environment. The vCenter Server will give you one single pane of glass to centrally manage your full vSphere environment (Figure 1-8). The vCenter Server also enables you to configure virtualization-related features that are related to computing and storage virtualization (VSAN).

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Figure 1-8

VMware vCenter Server

VMware Virtual Storage Area Network (VSAN)

VSAN is VMware’s implementation of software-defined storage (SDS). VSAN fully integrates with vSphere and acts as one single data store from a virtual perspective, but the storage is built with multiple ESXi hosts that have multiple physical disks installed.

The physical disks are all pooled together, and one single data store is presented to the vSphere infrastructure (Figure 1-9).

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Figure 1-9

VMware VSAN

NSX-v and NSX-T

Finally, NSX is VMware’s implementation of the software-defined network (SDN) (Figure 1-10). NSX is currently available in two flavors—NSX-v (NSX for vSphere) and NSX-T.

NSX offers various network services like routing, switching, load balancing, VPN, firewalling, and bridging as its primary services. In addition to these services, NSX also provides more network services, which are discussed later in this book.

The next chapters explain NSX-T and guide you through the installation, configuration, and management of NSX-T inside an enterprise infrastructure.

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Figure 1-10

VMware NSX

Note

NSX-v has been announced to be end of sale/end of support. NSX-T is its successor and is the NSX software that should be used for future deployments.

VMware VCF

VMware’s full SDDC software is also available in a bundle where the software versions and interoperability are thoroughly checked/tested if they are fully compatible with the software versions offered.

This product is called VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and inside VCF, you will find vSphere, VSAN, and NSX as the core (Figure 1-11). There are also other VMware software packages included, but these are out of scope for this book.

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Figure 1-11

VMware VCF

Summary

This chapter explained the software-defined data center (SDDC) and the different virtualized components from SDDC.

It explained what compute, storage, and network virtualization are and the difference between a virtual machine and a container.

At the end of the chapter, I showed you VMware’s specific implementation of the SDDC and the VMware products that form the SDDC. The next chapter introduces NSX-T.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

I. HoogendoornGetting Started with NSX-T: Logical Routing and Switching https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6708-0_2

2. An Introduction to NSX-T

Iwan Hoogendoorn¹  

(1)

Rotterdam, The Netherlands

NSX-T is VMware’s implementation of Software Defined Networking (SDN), as I described in the previous chapter. This chapter explains the NSX-T components and services that can be configured from the full Network Virtualization (NV) stack. It also dives into the main use cases of NSX-T. By the end of this chapter, you will understand how the NSX-T components interact with each other regarding the control, management, and data planes.

NSX-T Features

This chapter provides an overview of the features that are currently offered by NSX-T.

Platform-Related Features

Table 2-1 provides an overview of NSX-T’s platform-related features.

Table 2-1

Platform-Related Features