vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-T - Part1 - Prerequisites

In this blog series, I would like to share my experience deploying vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-T 3.0 networking. Following is a very high-level workflow of setting up the environment from scratch:

Software versions used for this study:

• vSphere 7 U1
• NSX-T 3.0.1.1

If you are using VCF, some of the deployment steps mentioned above are already automated. But, VCF is not in the scope of this blog series, and this post is aimed at explaining the workflow and background configurations that are required to prepare the environment before enabling workload management. This will be useful to understand the backend configuration tasks and logical workflow and will be helpful in case of troubleshooting too. In my lab, I have 4 Dell EMC PowerEdge rack servers connected to 2 TOR switches with 2 uplinks from each server. This is a consolidated architecture where both management components and application workload run on the same 4 node vSAN cluster. I am using ESXi 7 U1 and VCSA 7 U1. Here, the TORs are acting as L3 switches and we are doing BGP peering between TOR switches and NSX-T T0 Gateway which will be explained in a later part of this blog series.

Network connectivity

IP address schema and VLANs

I will not be covering how to create VLANs, configuring switch ports, deploying a vSAN cluster, etc. I assume that the network switches are correctly configured and the vSAN cluster is up and running. The next step is to deploy an NSX-T 3.0 appliance. You can either deploy it as a single node or in HA using 3 NSX-T appliances. In my lab, I have only one NSX-T 3.0 instance. Following are some of the reference material to deploy NSX-T 3.0:

https://vmarena.com/how-to-install-nsx-t-3-0-data-center-appliance-step-by-step/

https://www.vstellar.com/2020/08/05/nsx-t-3-0-seriespart-1-management-control-plane-setup/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S3cuN4h2qE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa9rE3_7AcA

In the next part I will walk you through the NSX-T configuration tasks. Hope it was useful. Cheers!

References

https://shuttletitan.com/nsx-t/nsx-t-installation-series/journey-to-nsx-t-vcp-nv-and-beyond-nsx-t-installation-series/

https://vxplanet.com/2020/04/25/nsx-t-3-0-edge-cluster-automated-deployment-and-architecture-in-vcf-4-0-part-1/

https://www.udemy.com/course/vmware-nsxt-fundamentals/