With the release of VMware Cloud Director (Previously vCloud Director), a lot of NSX-T related UI enhancements are added. In this post I will walk through some of them.

Dedicated External Networks

With Cloud Director 10.1, an edge gateway can be provisioned with a dedicated external network. In this configuration, there is a one-to-one relationship between the external network and the edge gateway, and no other edge gateways can connect to this external network.

Note: Provider creates a T0 gateway within NSX-T and add it to Cloud Director as an external network. Once T0 is added, provider could convert an existing org gateway (T1) to this new dedicated T0, or create a new org gateway with Dedicated External Network option selected.

BGP and Route Advertisement

BGP peering  & Route Advertisement functionalities are added on Edge Gateway UI.

Route Advertisement

You can decide which of the network subnets that are attached to org gateway will be advertised to the dedicated external network. If a subnet is not added to the advertisement filter, the route to it is not advertised to the external network and the subnet remains private.

BGP Peering

Tenants can now establish eBGP or iBGP connection between an NSX-T Data Center edge gateway and a router in their physical infrastructure. For BGP peering to work, a tenant should have a org gateway with direct external network configured. 

Edge Cluster Selection for T1 Gateways

Service Provider can explicitly chose a Edge Cluster when deploying T1 Gateway for Tenants.

This configuration will allow tenants to run edge gateway services on an edge cluster that is different from the one associated with the external network.

Attaching/Detaching Routed Networks

Functionality to attach/detach a routed org network from edge gateway is now part of NSX-T UI enhancement. This functionality was not available in vCD 10.0

IP Sets & Security Groups For Routed Networks

These 2 functionalities enables a tenant to assign tags to routed network based on the functionality/architecture topologies. VMs that are connected to a given network will follow the same sets of rules based on group/tag membership.

And that’s it for this post. In next post of this series I will cover the H5 enhancements that are introduced in Cloud Director. 

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing 🙂