Welcome to the last post of this series. I am sure if you are following this blog series, then you have got yourself familiar with how NSX ALB integrates with VCD to provide “Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS)”

In this post, I will demonstrate how tenants can leverage NSX ALB to create load balancer constructs (Virtual Services, Pools, etc)

If you haven’t read the previous posts in this series, I recommend you do so using the links provided below.

1: NSX ALB Integration with VCD – Supported Designs

2: NSX ALB Integration in VCD

3: Implementing Dedicated Service Engine Groups Design

4: Implementing Shared Service Engine Groups Design

Tenant vStellar has deployed a couple of servers that are connected to a routed network “Prod-GW” and have got IP addresses 192.168.40.5 and 192.168.40.6 respectively. 

Both servers are running an HTTP web server and are accessible via their local IP.

The tenant is looking for load balancing these web servers by leveraging NSX ALB.… Read More

Welcome to the 4th part of the NSX Advanced Load Balancer Integration with VMware Cloud Director series. The first post in this series covered Service Engine design topologies, while the second covered the processes for enabling “Load Balancing as a Service” in VCD. The deployment of the Dedicated Service Engine design was demonstrated in the third post.

This post will talk about the implementation of the Shared Service Engines design.

If you haven’t read the previous posts in this series, I recommend you do so using the links provided below.

1: NSX ALB Integration with VCD – Supported Designs

2: NSX ALB Integration in VCD

3: Implementing Dedicated Service Engine Groups Design

In Shared Service Engine Group design, tenant’s Edge Gateways can leverage a common Service Engine Group for the load balancer and virtual services placement. Since VCD tenants can have overlapping org networks implemented in their respective org’s, data traffic segregation is achieved by implementing VRF’s in NSX ALB.  … Read More

I discussed the supported design for NSX ALB integration with the VMware Cloud Director in the first post of this series. Part 2 of this series described how to enable “Load Balancing as a Service” in VCD. 

If you missed any of the previous posts in this series, I recommend that you read them using the links provided below.

1: NSX ALB Integration with VCD – Supported Designs

2: NSX ALB Integration in VCD

This blog post is focused on implementing the Dedicated Service Engine Groups design.

The below diagram shows the high-level overview of Dedicated SEG in VCD.

In this design, the management network of Service Engine (eth0) is attached to the tier-1 gateway dedicated for NSX ALB management and provisioned by the service provider. When a Virtual Service is created by the tenant, a logical segment corresponding to the VIP network is automatically created and gets attached to the tenant’s tier-1 gateway.… Read More

In the first post of this series, I discussed the design patterns that are supported for NSX ALB integration with VCD.

In this post, I will share the steps of the NSX ALB & Infra configuration, before implementing the supported designs. 

Step 1: Configure NSX-T Constructs

1a: Deploy a couple of new Edge nodes to place the Tier-0 gateway that you will be creating for the NSX ALB consumption. 

Associate the newly deployed edge nodes with the existing Edge Cluster.

1b: Create a Tier-0 and configure BGP. Also, ensure that Tier-1 connected segments are allowed to be redistributed via BGP.

1c: Create a Tier-1 gateway and associate it with the Tier-o gateway that you created in the previous step.

Ensure that the tier-1 gateway is configured to redistribute connected routes to the tier-0 gateway. 

1d: Create a DHCP-enabled logical segment for the Service Engine management and connect the segment to the tier-1 gateway which you created in the previous step.… Read More

Overview

NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides multi-cloud load balancing, web application firewall, application analytics, and container ingress services from the data center to the cloud. It is an Intent-based software load balancer that provides scalable application delivery across any infrastructure. NSX ALB provides 100% software load balancing to ensure a fast, scalable and secure application experience. It delivers elasticity and intelligence across any environment.

With the release of VCD 10.2, NSX Advanced Load Balancer integration is available for use by the tenants. Service Provider configured NSX ALB and exposes load balancing functionality to the tenants so that tenants can deploy load balancers in a self-service fashion. 

The latest release of VCD (10.3.1) supports NSX ALB versions up to 21.1.2. Please check the VMware product interop matrix before planning your deployment.

In this blog post, I will be talking about the NSX ALB design patterns for VCD and the ALB integration steps with VCD.… Read More