What is an NSX-T Edge? BRIEF explanation!

hey everyone Mike here I just wanted to do a quick video today on NSX T edges and kind of what they are a very high level overview before I get into kind of some of my videos around actually deploying them now first you'll notice I'm wearing a hoodie and and I'm not talking super loud and that's because it is 7:20 6:00 in the morning and you probably see there's a ladder behind me I was up on that thing at midnight last night with smoke alarms going off bad batteries that kind of thing and I've got kids sleeping right now so I guess I'm saying that because you know whatever your situation is you know you're busy you don't feel good you have too many you know too much work to do or you know whatever you can always find time to prioritize the things that are important to you and for me you know learning has always been important to me and I've always found time and honestly I'm not a morning person so this is tough so I'm here because I love what I do and I want to share it with you guys so that said let's get started kind of looking at the left here we have you know these different racks and within each rack we have these leaf switches these are physical switches in the environment they could be cisco brocade Dell whatever they are juniper and then below those connected to those switches we have these boxes these are vSphere hosts these are actually running VMware ESXi / vSphere on each of these boxes and on each of those boxes there's a number of VMs running in this case we're just depicting a few but these are just standard vmware ESX boxes so whenever I say hosts going forward I'm referring to these specifically these vSphere hosts now if you look over towards the right you'll see that we have kind of these two racks on the right ah excuse me you'll see we have these two racks on the right and we've got the kind of the blue top rack switches the reason these are blue is this is kind of the management / infrastructure rack and all that's used for as you'll see here there's like v centers here there's some management it's being around this rack in an edition of that there's also a couple of hosts that are kind of dedicated for edge connectivity or north-south connectivity now these are just hosts that are gonna house the NSX T edges that we're about to talk about you don't have to have dedicated servers for these edges you certainly can but you don't have to that's not a requirement by any means the reason that you would have a dedicated server is really centered around performance the reason you would have a dedicated server is really centered around performance maybe you don't want contention with other VMs running on that same host maybe you want all the network bandwidth just for those edges whatever the case is that's the reason you might have dedicated pair of those vSphere hosts but again not required you could just as easily put the edges that we're talking about on one of these vSphere hosts and it would be just fine so keep that in mind so you'll see in our case we've got these the green vSphere host which I'm going to call our edge host and then on top of that we have this is a green VM this is our edge VM so the edge whatever we talk about nsx the edges it's just a VM that is a container essentially or a pool of capacity is a better way to think about it so you have the VM right here this is the edge VM and inside of it you could have multiple virtual routers living inside of it it's also responsible for centralized services that's where we're gonna run things like bgp nat north-south firewalling and nsx is done on the edge so if we write a policy and say you know block ICMP into anything in the nsx environment that would be enforced at the edge now if we wrote a policy that said in this case don't let the green network talk to the orange network that's gonna be enforced at the distributed router level which is on every single host so when we talk about these edges the process the to deploy them is relatively simple they're just a VM but from a traffic flow standpoint I wanted to kind of show you guys this so this is basically what it looks like so when we talk about edges they're the on off ramp for the entire end so there is one notable exception which is if I'm doing a VLAN back Network in other words I'm using NSX but I'm just creating a standard you know VLAN 52 port group essentially and I'm connecting to a VM to it when that VM sends an arp out it's going to wait for a response from the physical network nsx will have nothing to do with it at that point in that case edges are not even required if you're doing that now if you're doing the overlay networking then edges are required and that's what you're seeing on this slide here so this only applies to overlay networking in NSX so when this this green VM wants to talk it's going to actually route there's a routing table on the host it sits on and it's going to route to its edge and the edge will then D capsulate the traffic and send it out to the physical network now the edges it's important to note that they can be a whole number of you know combinations from a availability standpoint they can be active active they can be active standby we can actually do up to eight active active edges for very very high throughput which is really the reason why a lot of people don't have to have a dedicated server for the edges I'm typically when we talk about a dedicated server an nsx t it's called a bare-metal edge and that really means you you basically have a physical server and you're dedicating it just for edge functionality now I'm gonna do a video shortly that will actually detail all of this and how to actually deploy it and I think it'll make a lot more sense but I just wanted to kind of give you guys a very high-level overview of what the edges for why is it there when is it required when is it not required hey before you guys go don't forget to Like and subscribe to the channel and comment below let me know what you guys think have a good one [Music]

Channel: NRDY Tech

Views: 3,603

Keywords: vmware nsxt, vmware nsx-v, nsx-v, nsx-t edge

Id: yIKfEdEs0Jo

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020