Starting with version 10.2, VMware Cloud Director supports data center group networking backed by NSX.
To create a network across multiple organization VDCs, you first group the VDCs and then create a group network that is shared with them.
Data center group networks backed by NSX provide level-2 network sharing, single active egress point configuration, and distributed firewall (DFW) rules that are applied across a data center group.
- Data center group
- A data center group acts as a cross-VDC router that provides centralized networking administration, egress point configuration, and east-west traffic between all networks within the group. A data center group can contain between one and 16 VDCs that you configure to share an active egress point.
- Availability zone
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An availability zone represents the compute clusters or compute fault domains that are available to the network. By default, the availability zone is the provider VDC.
Important: Your system administrator must configure the availability zones for group networking with NSX by setting a Compute Provider Scope for the vCenter Server instance and, optionally, for the provider VDCs backed by the vCenter Server instance. By default, the compute provider scope of a provider VDC is copied from the vCenter Server instance which is backing this VDC. A system administrator can differentiate the compute provider scope for the different provider VDCs that are backed by a single vCenter Server instance. For example, you can have a vCenter Server instance with a scope Germany and a provider VDC with a scope Munich.Your system administrator can also reconfigure the availability zone to be the network provider scope, which typically represents the underlying vCenter Server instance with the associated NSX Manager.
- Egress point
- An existing NSX edge gateway that you configure to connect a data center group to an external network.
- Data center group network
- A layer 2 network that is shared across all VDCs in a data center group.
