Last week I tried my hands on latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation (4.0.1) and came across a cool feature where we can bringup a SDDC with Multi-VDS and Multi-NIC (more than 2) for traffic separation. This is one of the most asked feature request by VCF customers and finally its available.

What is VDS Profile and what problem it is solving?

VCF configuration workbook has now got a new configuration setting called “vSphere Distributed Switch Profile” and this setting is available under Hosts & Networks tab.

VDS profile allow you to deploy a SDDC with custom VDS design. In earlier versions of VCF, when you do a SDDC bringup, no matter how many physical nic’s your server’s has got, only 2 of them were being utilized in bringup.  The additional NIC’s were just laying waste there. 

Imagine you are a Cloud Service Provider, and you have invested heavily in servers with 4 or 6 NIC’s. Now you are looking for a solution for automated deployment of SDDC, and you came to know about VCF solution. But when you hear about this limitation that you can only use 2 NIC’s of your server, you might get disappointed as all of sudden this solution won’t seem fit as per your infrastructure. 

VCF 4.0.1 solves this challenge for you. Now you can deploy SDDC’s with Multi-NIC’s and Multi-VDS design.

Important Note: Although older version (< 4.0.1) of VCF also supported multi-vds design, but via API and custom json only. There was no way to specify these options in configuration workbook which is shipped with VCF.

There are 3 profiles available for VDS. Each profile have a settings for controlling total number of NIC’s and VDS selection. 

Let’s have a look at each profile one by one so that it will give us more clarity.

Profile-1

This profile supports only one VDS. You can have 2 NIC’s on this VDS (default) or you can specify 4 NIC’s by editing Primary VDS-pNICs field.

If you select the default setting, you will get only one VDS (Converged VDS) with 2 NIC’s and all datacenter traffic will pass via this VDS only.

Note: This is similar to SDDC bringup of VCF 4.0.

Profile-2

Profile-2 will allow you to specify 2 VDS. Each VDS will host 2 physical NIC’s. The first VDS is a regular vSphere VDS and Management, vMotion and vSAN traffic will be passed via this VDS.

The other VDS will be NSX-vSwitch and will be only utilized by overlay traffic. This is a great way to segregate underlay traffic from overlay.

Profile-3

Profile-3 also supports more than one VDS, but with a difference that the secondary VDS will be only utilized by vSAN traffic. The primary VDS will be carrying regular vMotion & Mgmt traffic along with overlay traffic.

This profile will be very helpful for customers who were looking for complete segregation of vSAN traffic from any other traffic flowing through their SDDC.

I have attached a couple of screenshots from my lab. I used Profile-2 for Mgmt SDDC bringup and this is how VDS architecture looks post bringup. 

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 🙂