An NSX Data Center for vSphere edge gateway provides a routed organization VDC network with connectivity to external networks and can provide services such as load balancing, network address translation, and a firewall.

Starting with VMware Cloud Director 9.7, NSX Data Center for vSphere edge gateways are deployed on edge clusters that you previously created and assigned to the organization VDC.

You can add an IPv4 or IPv6 edge gateway that connects to one or more external networks.

Note: IPv6 edge gateways support limited services. IPv6 edge gateways support edge firewalls, distributed firewalls, and static routing.

Prerequisites

  • For information about the system requirements for deploying an NSX Data Center for vSphere edge gateway, see the NSX Administration Guide.
  • If you want to deploy the edge gateway on a dedicated edge cluster, create and assign an edge cluster to the organization virtual data center. See Working with NSX Data Center for vSphere Edge Clusters.

Procedure

  1. From the top navigation bar, select Resources and click Cloud Resources.
  2. In the left pane, click Edge Gateways and click New.
  3. Select the NSX-V backed organization virtual data center on which you want to create the edge gateway, and click Next.
  4. Enter a name and, optionally, a description for the new edge gateway.
  5. Turn on or leave turned off each of these general edge gateway settings.
    General Setting Description
    Distributed Routing Configures the edge gateway to provide distributed logical routing.
    FIPS Mode Configures the edge gateway to use NSX FIPS mode.
    High Availability Enables automatic failover to a backup edge gateway.
  6. Select the edge gateway configuration for your system resources and click Next.
    Configuration Description
    Compact Requires less memory and fewer compute resources.
    Large Provides increased capacity and performance than the Compact configuration. Large and X-Large configurations provide identical security functions.
    X-Large Used for environments that have a load balancer with large numbers of concurrent sessions.
    Quad Large Used for high throughput environments. Requires a high connection rate.
  7. Select one or more subnets from the external networks to which the edge gateway can connect, and click Next.
    If you assigned an edge cluster to the organization VDC, the displayed list contains the external networks that are accessible to this edge cluster.
  8. (Optional) Configure a network as the default gateway.
    1. Turn on the Configure default gateway toggle.
    2. Click the radio button next to the name of the target external network, and click the radio button next to the target IP address.
    3. (Optional) Turn on the Use default gateway for DNS Relay toggle.
  9. Click Next.
  10. Turn on or leave turned off each of these advanced edge gateway settings, and click Next.
    Advanced Setting Description
    IP Settings You can manually enter an IP address for each subnet on the edge gateway.
    Sub-Allocate IP Pools You can suballocate multiple static IP pools from the available IP pools of each external network on the edge gateway.
    Rate Limits You can configure the inbound and outbound rate limits for each external network on the edge gateway.
  11. (Optional) If you enabled one or more advanced settings in Step 10, configure each enabled setting.
    Advanced Setting Steps
    IP Settings For each network on the edge gateway, in the IP Addresses cell, enter an IP address, and click Next.

    If you do not enter an IP address for a network, the system assigns an arbitrary IP address to this network.

    Sub-Allocate IP Pools
    1. Click the radio button next to the name of an external network and click Edit.

      You can see the available IP pools for this external network and the current suballocated IP pools, if configured.

    2. Edit the suballocated IP pools for this external network and click Save.

      You can add IP addresses and ranges from the ranges of the available IP pools.

    3. Click Save.

      The system combines overlapping IP ranges.

    4. Click Next.
    Note: Allocating IP addresses to an edge gateway is a process where the provider assigns ownership of IP addresses to the gateway. VMware Cloud Director automatically configures the appropriate gateway interface with the secondary addresses during the allocation process. If any of the IP addresses are used outside of VMware Cloud Director, this can cause IP address conflicts.
    Rate limits For each external network on the edge gateway, turn on the Enable toggle, enter the limits in the Incoming Rate and Outgoing Rates cells, and click Next.
  12. Review the Ready to Complete page, and click Finish.