Book Image

VMware NSX Cookbook

By : Bayu Wibowo, Tony Sangha
Book Image

VMware NSX Cookbook

By: Bayu Wibowo, Tony Sangha

Overview of this book

This book begins with a brief introduction to VMware's NSX for vSphere Network Virtualization solutions and how to deploy and configure NSX components and features such as Logical Switching, Logical Routing, layer 2 bridging and the Edge Services Gateway. Moving on to security, the book shows you how to enable micro-segmentation through NSX Distributed Firewall and Identity Firewall and how to do service insertion via network and guest introspection. After covering all the feature configurations for single-site deployment, the focus then shifts to multi-site setups using Cross-vCenter NSX. Next, the book covers management, backing up and restoring, upgrading, and monitoring using built-in NSX features such as Flow Monitoring, Traceflow, Application Rule Manager, and Endpoint Monitoring. Towards the end, you will explore how to leverage VMware NSX REST API using various tools from Python to VMware vRealize Orchestrator.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


In this chapter, we will show you how to configure and prepare the vSphere cluster for VXLAN and create a logical switch network. Before getting into the recipes, here is background information on VXLAN and other VMware NSX objects that are related to it.

VMware NSX Logical Switch and VXLAN

The VMware NSX logical switch is a layer 2 broadcast domain that is implemented using VXLAN (Virtual eXtensible LAN) overlay network. VXLAN is standardized in IETF RFC 7348 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7348). VXLAN adds 50 bytes on top of the original Ethernet frame (with a standard of 1,500 bytes) and encapsulates the source Ethernet frame in a new UDP packet. The 50 bytes consist of:

  • 8 bytes VXLAN header added on top of the original inner Ethernet frame
  • 8 bytes outer UDP header
  • 20 bytes outer IP header
  • 14 bytes outer Ethernet header

The following figure shows the VXLAN packet format:

The minimum MTU required for VXLAN is 1,550 bytes. In IPv6 deployments, an extra of 16-32 bytes is required and...