NSX-v Testing Series – Part 1 – ESG HA, OSPF, Graceful Restart

In the past 3-4 years since I have been started playing around with NSX-v, first version 6.0.4, I have been testing features here and there, performing demos after I join VMware, without really documenting down. Its always test and forget. So now, I’m going to start documenting down my tests with blogging, recording videos and diagrams.

*Disclaimer: You will find incomplete blog posts because with my work commitments and being a dad of 2 young kids, its really tough to blog in a single block of time. I will update whenever I can and with my best ability.

First off the list, I’m going to start with ESG (Edge Services Gateway) High Availability. Why? The ESG is the gateway between virtual and physical, services rich(LB/NAT/Firewall/VPN), always required in every NSX deployment. In the region I served – South East Asia and Korea, many customers footprint size falls between 20 – 40 physical ESXi hosts and North-South bandwidth typically is under 10Gbps. Therefore, a single ESG is suffice to meet these performance requirements. However, since so many services can be turn on on the ESG, the availability is very important. We can always depends on vSphere HA but the reboot of VM would depends takes time. Therefore, application level HA is required and we have ESG-HA or Edge-HA.

[Placeholder for Network Diagram]

CSR – ESG(s) – DLR – Test VM (High level connectivity)

First Edge-HA Failover Test (OSPF default timers with Graceful Restart)