Book Image

VMware NSX Network Essentials

By : sreejith c
Book Image

VMware NSX Network Essentials

By: sreejith c

Overview of this book

VMware NSX is at the forefront of the software-defined networking revolution. It makes it even easier for organizations to unlock the full benefits of a software-defined data center – scalability, flexibility – while adding in vital security and automation features to keep any sysadmin happy. Software alone won’t power your business – with NSX you can use it more effectively than ever before, optimizing your resources and reducing costs. Getting started should be easy – this guide makes sure it is. It takes you through the core components of NSX, demonstrating how to set it up, customize it within your current network architecture. You’ll learn the principles of effective design, as well as some things you may need to take into consideration when you’re creating your virtual networks. We’ll also show you how to construct and maintain virtual networks, and how to deal with any tricky situations and failures. By the end, you’ll be confident you can deliver, scale and secure an exemplary virtualized network with NSX.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
VMware NSX Network Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Layer 2 bridges


Logical network to physical network access might be required due to multiple reasons in a NSX environment:

  • During Physical to Virtual (P2V) migrations where changing IP addresses is not an option

  • Extending virtual services in the logical switch to external devices

  • Extending physical network services to virtual machines in logical switches

  • Accessing existing physical network and security resources

Since Layer 2 bridging is a NSX Edge Distributed Logical Router functionality, the L2 bridge runs on the same host on which the edge logical router control virtual machine is running. Bridging is entirely done at kernel level, as it was for Distributed Logical Routing. A special dvPort type called a sink port is used to steer packets to the bridge. In the following screenshot, we have a VXLAN environment wherein virtual machines in VXLAN network 5006 need to communicate with a physical site, which is in VLAN-100:

NSX Layer 2 bridging

Deploying an L2 bridge

Let's have a look at the deployment...