Application Virtual Network was first introduced in VCF 3.9.1. AVN networks are nothing but software-defined overlay networks that spans across zone of clusters and traverse NSX-T Edge Gateways for their North-South traffic (ingress and egress).

One of the requirement for an AVN enabled SDDC bringup was to configure BGP on NSX-T edges. In production environment, BGP routing is not an issue, but there are situations (Lab/POC) when you don’t have BGP support available and that can be an hindrance in implementing and testing AVN.

In this post I am gonna propose a workaround which you can implement in your lab to test this feature. To perform AVN based SDDC bringup, we can leverage static routes instead of BGP. Below are high level steps for doing so.

Step 1: Download VCF configuration workbook and fill in all the details. In Deploy Parameters tab of the spreadsheet, fill BGP specific details with some dummy data.

Step 2: Upload the filled configuration workbook to CloudBuilder and use JsonGenerator tool to convert xlsx workbook to json file using below command:

root@cloud-builder [ ~ ]# /opt/vmware/sddc-support/sos –jsongenerator –jsongenerator-design vcf-ems –jsongenerator-input <path-to-xls>

Running above command generates a json file with name vcf-ems.json in directory /opt/vmware/sddc-support/cloud_admin_tools/Resources/vcf-ems/

Note: In VCF 4.0.1, vcf-ems.json file is renamed to vcf-public-ems.json and it is located in directory /opt/vmware/sddc-support/cloud_admin_tools/Resources/vcf-public-ems

Step 3: Update the JSON file to disable BGP on the NSX-T Edges deployed during Bringup.

Edit the json file and locate the section in the json file with key:

and change it to

Step 4: Change T0 HA mode from Active-Active to Active-Standby

Locate the section in the json file with the key:

 and change it to:

Post making above changes download the modified json file and upload it to the Cloud Builder UI and perform Bringup. 

Post Bringup Steps:

1: Disable BGP on Tier-0 Gateway: Performing Bringup using the steps listed above does not configure BGP on the Tier-0 Gateway of the NSX-T Edges but enables it. You have to manually disable BGP on the T0 Gateway

2: Configure Static Routes: Static routes needs to be manually configured on T0 gateway to make AVN subnets to talk to upstream devices.

Note: As part of validation, please verify that from the SDDC Manager you are able to reach to the AVN gateways specified in the json file which was used for SDDC 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 🙂