Recently while playing with VCF, I noticed one annoying thing about NSX-T deployment for workload domain. By default NSX-T managers are deployed in large form factor with 48 GB of memory and all 48 GB reserved.

Also SDDC Manager checks for 144 GB of free memory at custer level where NSX-T managers will be deployed.

For production environments this setup works fine as we have plenty of resources, but for Lab/POC purpose 48 GB per node seems too big in my opinion (I am open to discussion on this)

In this post we will learn how to deploy NSX-T for workload domains with custom size. 

NSX-T deployment form factor can be controlled via /opt/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/config/application-prod.properties file. To use custom form factor, login to sddc manager as root user and edit this file to add below properties:

Restart domain manager service post making the modification in the file.

# systemctl restart domainmanager

Make sure to check domain manager service is operational post service restart.

Update: 11-05-2020

You can also control number of NSX-T managers that will be deployed, via parameter “nsxt.manager.cluster.size=1′ in application-prod.properties file

And that’s it for this post. 

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