An NSX-T Data Center edge gateway provides a routed organization VDC network or a data center group network with connectivity to external networks and IP management properties. It can also provide services such as firewall, network address translation (NAT), IPSec VPN, DNS forwarding, and DHCP, which is enabled by default.

Dedicated Tier-0 Gateways

To provide a fully routed network topology in a virtual data center, your system administrator can dedicate a tier-0 gateway to a specific VMware Cloud Director edge gateway that is backed by NSX-T Data Center.

In this configuration, there is a one-to-one relationship between the tier-0 and the VMware Cloud Director edge gateway, and other edge gateways cannot connect to the external network.

An VMware Cloud Director edge gateway or a VRF gateway that is associated with a dedicated tier-0 is part of the tenant networking stack. The tier-0 gateway is considered a part of the VMware Cloud Director network routing domain.

A dedicated tier-0 provides additional edge gateway routing services, such as route advertisement management and border gateway protocol (BGP) configuration.

You can decide which of the networks that are attached to the edge gateway to advertise to the tier-0 gateway. This makes possible a mixture of NAT-routed and fully routed organization virtual data center networks.