Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this blog post are my own and not a reflection of VMware or Dell Technologies.
This is the first post in a series documenting how I have NSX-T configured in my Home SDDC environment and working (initially) with Enterprise PKS.
Let’s just get that out of the way right now. The two products, although they share a common name, are almost nothing alike when you drill down into the design and implementation. The functionality between the two products is nearly aligned, and the high-level concepts (SDN, DFW, Security Tags, etc.) are all there, but the practical implementation of these concepts is drastically different.
The hardest part for me in adopting NSX-T in my own SDDC environments has been that it felt like I needed to throw out all of my NSX-v knowledge and start over completely.
Having said that, it’s the direction VMware is moving with SDN and NSX-T is indeed the future — so get on the bus!
As a previous post detailed, my Home SDDC Lab is relatively basic. It’s purpose built for me to play with all the new tech coming out of VMware and be able to validate reference architectures, operational procedures and deployment automation. It’s nothing like what a production-grade enterprise environment would look like — my budget is a rounding-error for some organizations.
That being said, here is what I laid out to accomplish in my SDDC with NSX-T:
Breaking down the diagram a bit, here are a few key items:
With the initial NSX-T components and test VMs deployed (and attached to each of the 3 overlay segments) it was time to test connectivity to validate things were configured properly.
By far the largest challenge the past few days has been to piece together all of the different documentation versions, community blog posts, and official PKS documentation reference architectures into a single, cohesive method for configuring the environment. The number of changes from my early days with NSX-T (v1.9) to the current version v2.5.0 that is running is staggering, as such much of the documentation available at this time was incomplete or no longer accurate. The next blog post will walk through the configuration steps, with screenshots for NSX-T v2.5.0, for setting up all the components.
Enjoy!