Planning and Preparation of Advanced Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation

Before you start implementing the components of the Advanced Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation validated solution, you must set up an environment that has a specific compute, storage, and network configuration, and that provides external services to the components of the solution.

You need to review the Planning and Preparation of Advanced Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation documentation ahead of deployment of NSX Advanced Load Balancer to avoid costly rework and delays.

Hardware Requirements

To implement the NSX Advanced Load Balancer from this design, your hardware must meet certain requirements.

Component	Requirement per Region
Servers	BIOS Configuration Advanced Encryption Standard-New Instructions (AES-NI) Enabled
Network Interfaces	Minimum of 10GB

Component

Requirement per Region

Servers

BIOS Configuration

Advanced Encryption Standard-New Instructions (AES-NI) Enabled

Network Interfaces

Minimum of 10GB

Software Requirements

To implement the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer from this design, your software must have the requirements specified in the Solution Interoperability of Advanced Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation section.

SCP Backup Target

You can choose to setup a Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) service for remote backups of NSX Advanced Load Balancer before you deploy the components of this design.

Dedicate space on a remote server to save data backups for NSX Advanced Load Balancer over SCP.

Requirement	Description
Backup Target	A backup target for the Controller VMs in the SDDC. The server must support SCP connections.

VLANs and IP Subnets

This validated solution requires that you allocate certain VLAN IDs and IP subnets for the traffic types in the SDDC.

For the Controllers, it is recommended to share the port-group used for core VMware Cloud Foundation management services. This means that Controller VMs should use the same port-group as used by vCenter Server(s) and NSX Manager(s).

For the Service Engines, an VLAN-backed NSX segment(s) can be used for:

The management network for the Service Engines for both types of NSX-T Cloud Connector integrations i.e. overlay-backed and VLAN-backed on the NSX Advanced Load Balancer.
The data network(s) for the Service Engines for NSX-T Cloud Connector integration of type VLAN on the NSX Advanced Load Balancer.

Overlay-backed NSX Segments and IP Subnets

If an overlay-backed NSX segment is being used in the VI workload domains, this design requires that you allocate certain overlay-backed NSX segments connected to a Tier-1 logical router and IP subnets for the Service Engine(s) to service traffic.

Cluster	Overlay-backed NSX Segment Function	Logical Segment Name	Subnet
VI workload domain	Management network for the Service Engines.	sfo-w01-cl01-vds01-pg-avimgmt
VI workload domain	Data Network for the Service Engines. Note: More can be added as required.	sfo-w01-cl01-vds01-pg-avidata01

Note:

Alternatively, a NSX VLAN segment could be used as the management network for the Service Engines.

Host Names and IP Addresses

Before you deploy the NSX Advanced Load Balancer by following this design, you must define the host names and IP addresses for the Controller VMs and configure them in DNS with fully qualified domain names (FQDN) that map the host names to their IP addresses.

Table 1. Example
Component	IP Address	Description
The Controller cluster VIP	10.10.10.100	The Controller cluster VIP Interface
The Controller instances	10.10.10.101	The Controller instances for the management cluster
	10.10.10.102
	10.10.10.103

Workload Footprint

Before you deploy the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, you must provide sufficient compute and storage resources to meet the footprint requirements of the Controller cluster and the Service Engines.

Note:

It is required that the Controller VMs are created in the management workload domain of the VMware Cloud Foundation.

Workload Footprint for Management Domain

Workload	vCPUs	vRAM (GB)	Storage (GB)
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller cluster
Total
Total with 30% free storage capacity

Workload Footprint for VI Workload Domain

Workload	vCPUs	vRAM (GB)	Storage (GB)
Service Engines
Total
Total with 30% free storage capacity