To provide virtual service management capabilities to your tenants, import service engine groups to your VMware Cloud Director deployment.

A service engine group is an isolation domain that also defines shared service engine properties, such as size, network access, and failover.

Resources in a service engine group can be used for different virtual services, depending on your tenant needs. These resources cannot be shared between different service engine groups.

You can manage and update service engine groups by using NSX Advanced Load Balancer. After you update a service engine group in NSX Advanced Load Balancer, you must sync it to update its settings in the VMware Cloud Director UI.

Only an imported service engine group can be assigned to an edge gateway.

To import a service engine group, associate it with an NSX Cloud that is already registered with your VMware Cloud Director instance.

Note: If you are using NSX Advanced Load Balancer with a Standard feature set, before importing a service engine group, consider configuring it with elastic HA active/active mode with 1 active service engine and 1 buffer service engine to ensure a seamless transition to Premium, if necessary. For details, see VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Installation Guide.

Prerequisites

  • Install and configure NSX Advanced Load Balancer with your NSX instance. For detailed information on how to configure NSX Advanced Load Balancer with NSX, see Avi Integration with NSX.
  • Register a Controller.
  • Register an NSX Cloud.
  • Verify that you acquired a NSX Advanced Load Balancer Enterprise Edition license. See VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Administration Guide.

Procedure

  1. From the top navigation bar, under Resources, click Infrastructure Resources.
  2. Click NSX-ALB and then click Service Engine Groups.
  3. To import a service engine group, click Add.
  4. From the drop-down menu, select an NSX Cloud.
  5. Select a reservation model.
    • To assign the service engine group to a single edge gateway, select Dedicated.
    • To share the service engine group between several edge gateways, select Shared.
  6. Enter a name and, optionally, a description, for the service engine group.
  7. From the drop-down menu, select a feature set.
    Option Description
    Standard The standard feature set provides the load balancing features included in VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Basic Edition.
    Premium The premium feature set provides some of the features included in VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Enterprise Edition, such as, for example, additional load balancing pool algorithm types and pool persistence profiles, virtual service analytics, pool analytics, multiple virtual service ports, and additional virtual service application profile types.
  8. Select a service engine group instance.
  9. Click Add.

What to do next

Enable load balancing on the edge gateway and assign the service engine group to the edge gateway. See Managing NSX Advanced Load Balancing on an NSX Edge Gateway in VMware Cloud Director.