How To Install NSX-T 3.0 Data Center Appliance Step by Step
VMware NSX-T Data Center is our next generation product that provides a scalable network virtualization and micro-segmentation platform for multi-hypervisor environments, container deployments, and native workloads running in public cloud environments.
In this post, we will share the prerequisites and procedures to deploy the NSX Manager on the vSphere 7.0 Platform.
About Our Testing Environment
We are running vSphere 7.0 with vSAN 7.0 nested environment to deploy NSX-T 3.0
Supported Hosts for NSX Managers
Support Description
Hypervisor
ESXi
vSphere 7.0 , 6.7 U3 , 6.7 U2 ,6.7 U1 ,6.5 U3 ,6.5 U2
Thin virtual disk size is 3.8 GB and thick virtual disk size is 300 GB.
Appliance Size
Memory
vCPU
Disk Space
VM Hardware Version
NSX Manager Extra small
8 GB
2
300 GB
10 or later
NSX Manager Small
16 GB
4
300 GB
10 or later
NSX Manager Medium
24 GB
6
300 GB
10 or later
NSX Manager Large
48 GB
12
300 GB
10 or later
NSX Manager Browser Support
The following browsers are recommended for working with NSX Manager.
Browser
Windows 10
Mac OS X 10.13, 10.14
Ubuntu 18.04
Google Chrome 80
Yes
Yes
Yes
Mozilla Firefox 72
Yes
Yes
Yes
Microsoft Edge 80
Yes
Apple Safari 13
Yes
Network Latency Requirements
The maximum network latency between NSX Managers in a NSX Manager cluster is 10ms.
The maximum network latency between NSX Managers and Transport Nodes is 150ms.
Storage Requirements
The maximum disk access latency is under 10ms.
It is recommended that NSX Managers be placed on shared storage.
Storage should be highly available to avoid a storage outage causing all NSX Manager file systems to be placed into read-only mode upon the event of a storage failure.
IP & DNS
Required Static IP address and FQDN to deploy NSX Manager
NSX Manager Installation
NSX Manager provides a graphical user interface (GUI) and REST APIs for creating, configuring, and monitoring NSX-T Data Center components such as logical switches, logical routers, and firewalls.NSX Manager provides a system view and is the management component of the NSX-T Data Center. For high availability, the NSX-T Data Center supports a management cluster of three NSX Managers.
In a vSphere environment, the following functions are supported by NSX Manager:
vCenter Server can use the vMotion function to live migrate NSX Manager across hosts and clusters.
vCenter Server can use the Storage vMotion function to live migrate NSX Manager across hosts and clusters.
vCenter Server can use the Distributed Resource Scheduler function to rebalance NSX Manager across hosts and clusters.
vCenter Server can use the Anti-affinity function to manage NSX Manager across hosts and clusters.
Procedure
Download the NSX-T Data Center OVA file from VMware download portal
From vSphere Client, select the host or host cluster on which to install the NSX-T Data Center.
Right-click and select Deploy OVF template to start the installation wizard
Browse the OVA file and click Next.
Enter a name and a location for the NSX Manager VM, and click Next
Select a compute resource for the NSX Manager appliance, and click Next
Review and verify the OVF template details, and click Next.
Specify the deployment configuration size, and click Next
Specify storage for the configuration and disk files
Select a destination network for each source network and Configure IP Allocation settings as Static and Click Next.
Fill the required fields on the Customize Template section of the Deploy OVF Template wizard
Note:- You must comply with requirements of customization, example password requirements for the admin user
Note:- In case any doubt, please follow the instruction on the VMware Docs
Don’t fill Internal Properties option, leave it as default and Click Next
Verify that all your custom OVF template specification is accurate and click Finish to initiate the installation
The installation might take 7-8 minutes, you can monitor the progress on the Recent Tasks
Once the installation is completed, From a browser, log in with admin privileges to an NSX Manager at https://<nsx-manager-ip-address>
Read and accept the EULA terms
Select whether to join the VMware’s Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) and Click Save
Now installation is and initialization is completed
Error Faced in the NSX-T 3.0 Deployment
We faced some issue after deployment with below error, Actually, it is not an error this is because some times NSX Manager takes more time to bring up all services, and you have wait for few minutes to come up all services. This issue specific to my test environment and if any of you faced and services couldn’t came up that need to be check-in manager VM by login or pen case with VMware.
Error – Some Appliance components are not functioning properly
Log in to the console of NSX Manager and run the get services commands verify that all the services are running
Conclusion
As we know NSX-T 3.0 is released recently with many new features and enhancements, In this post, we covered the only deployment of NSX Manager will be sharing more posts soon with configuration and how can we test the features.