We began this chapter by preparing our environment and understanding the different limitations of NSX in order to begin its deployment. We then went ahead and deployed the NSX Manager using the vSphere web client. Remember that NSX cannot be managed by the traditional Windows client and can only be managed by the vSphere web client. We then had a quick overview of the NSX Manager to familiarize ourselves with the management interface functionality. Next, we went ahead and configured our NSX Manager with our vCenter server. This allowed us to start the configuration of the NSX services for our vCenter. We managed our NSX Manager using the vSphere web client and continued to deploy our control plane. Lastly, we prepared our hosts for network virtualization by deploying the data plane that, by default, enables the distributed firewall service on all ESXi hosts in a cluster.

In the next chapter, we will go over the step-by-step deployment and configuration of multiple NSX features and...