In last post of this series we prepared the Esxi host for NSX-T and we ensured that host connection to NSX manager was up and all necessary vib’s have been pushed on hosts. In this post we will learn about uplink profile.
If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:
4: NSX Controllers Automated Deployment
5: NSX Controllers Manual Deployment
6: Prepare Esxi host to form NSX-T Fabric
What is Uplink profile in NSX-T?
From VMware documentation:
An uplink profile defines policies for the links from hypervisor hosts to NSX-T logical switches or from NSX Edge nodes to top-of-rack switches.
Confused? All right lets simplify it a bit.
Uplink profile is pretty much similar to specifying the teaming policy when you enable VXLAN on Esxi host in NSX-v. The settings which you can define in an uplink profile are teaming policies, active/standby links, the transport VLAN ID, and the MTU setting.
Uplink profiles allow you to consistently configure identical capabilities for network adapters across multiple hosts or nodes. To know more about uplink profiles, please read NSX-T Documentation
To create an uplink profile, login to NSX manager UI and navigate to Home > Fabric > Profiles > Uplink Profiles and click on + button
Provide a name for the profile and optional description.
Teaming Policy: Teaming policy dictates how the hostswitches will be using its uplinks to achieve load balancing and redundancy. There are 2 types of teaming policy that can be specified in an uplink profile.
- 1: Failover Order: In this teaming policy an active uplink is specified in conjunction with optional standby uplink. In case of active uplink failure, next available standby uplinks becomes active. This teaming policy can be used for both Esxi and KVM hypervisiors.
- 2: Load Balanced Source: In this teaming policy more than one Active uplinks are specified and hostswitches can use all active uplinks. This policy is only supported for Esxi hosts.
Specify transport VLAN (if any) and MTU settings that is default 1600.
Click on Add to finish the uplink profile creation wizard.
Note: The Active/Standby uplinks entry is simply an identifier here. You can give any name as identifier. The actual mapping of uplink is done during transport node creation where you will select which of the free pNIC of host will be mapped to the uplink.
I created 2 uplink profiles in my lab. One for Esxi host and other for the edge VM’s that I will be deploying later.
And that’s it for this post. In next post of this series we will configure Transport zones.
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