Deployment Model for the NSX Edge Nodes for a Virtual Infrastructure Workload Domain

For NSX Edge nodes, you determine the form factor, the appliance number, and placement according to the requirements for network services in the VI workload domain.

An NSX Edge node is an appliance that provides centralized networking services which can not be distributed to hypervisors, such as load balancing, NAT, VPN, and physical network uplinks. Some services, such as Tier-0 gateways, are limited to a single instance per NSX Edge node. However, most services can coexist in these nodes.

NSX Edge nodes are grouped in one or more edge clusters, representing a pools of capacity for NSX-T Data Center services.

Form Factors of NSX Edge Nodes

An NSX Edge node can be deployed as a virtual appliance, or installed on bare-metal hardware. The edge node on bare-metal hardware can have better performance capabilities at the expense of more difficult deployment and limited deployment topology use cases.

Design Component	Edge Virtual Appliance Deployed via SDDC Manager	Edge Virtual Appliance Deployed via NSX Manager	Edge Bare Metal Appliance	Considerations
Ease of deployment and ease of expansion	↑↑	↑	↓	You can deploy NSX Edge virtual appliances from NSX Manager, SDDC Manager, or directly from OVA. Deployment of bare-metal appliances have certain hardware compatibility requirements and must be manually deployed and connected to the environment.
Ease of upgrade and life cycle management	o	o	↓	NSX Manager provides life cycle management for associated NSX Edge nodes. NSX Edge nodes on bare-metal hardware require individual hardware life cycle management of firmware, drivers, and so on.
Manageability	↑↑	↑	o	NSX Edge nodes on bare-metal hardware require individual monitoring and management of the hardware, such as failures, firmware, and so on. SDDC Manager can rotate the passwords only of the NSX Edge virtual appliances. Because SDDC Manager is not aware of the bare-metal NSX Edge appliances, it is unable to rotate their passwords.
Availability and recoverability	↑↑	↑↑	↓	If a failure of the hardware hosting the NSX Edge virtual appliance node occurs, vSphere HA automatically restarts the appliance on another host. If a failure of an NSX Edge node on bare-metal hardware occurs, it must be redeployed.
Capability	o	o	o	NSX Edge virtual appliances and NSX Edge nodes on bare-metal hardware provide the same network services.
Design agility	↑	↑↑	↓	Requires deploying a bare-metal NSX Edge appliance in each availability zone for network failover. Deploying a bare-metal edge in each availability zone requires considering asymmetric routing Requires edge fault domains if more than one edge is deployed in each availability zone for Active/Standby Tier-0/Tier-1 gateways. Cannot be used to support AVNs in the management domain.
Performance	↑	↑	↑↑	In certain use cases, an NSX Edge node on bare-metal hardware can support more raw performance and lower latency. The performance of an NSX Edge virtual appliance depends on the underlying ESXi host. To improve performance, migrate the appliance to a host that has higher performance.
Capacity	o	o	↑	In rare use cases, an NSX Edge node on bare-metal hardware can support more raw capacity. NSX Edge virtual appliance can easily be scaled up and down as needed.

Sizing Compute and Storage Resources for NSX Edge Nodes

When you size the resources for NSX-T Data Center components, consider the compute and storage requirements for each component, and the number of nodes per component type.

Table 1. Resource Specifications of NSX Edge Nodes per Form Factor

Form Factor		Appliance Size	CPU or vCPU	Memory (GB)	Storage (GB)
NSX Edge on bare metal hardware	Minimum requirements	-	8 CPU	8	200
	Recommended requirements	-	24 CPU	256	500
NSX Edge virtual appliance		Small Use for proof of concept only	2 vCPU	4	200
		Medium	4 vCPU	8	200
		Large Use in large environments that require load balancers	8 vCPU	32	200
		Extra Large	16	64	200

Table 2. Design Decisions on the Form Factor and Sizing for the NSX Edge Nodes

Design ID	Design Decision	Design Justification	Design Implication
VCF-WLD-NSX-EDGE-CFG-001	Use large-size NSX Edge virtual appliances.	The large-size appliance provides the required performance characteristics for most tenant workloads.	None.