This section explains how to configure DNS profile and native DNS hosting solution of NSX Advanced Load Balancer.

The following are the steps to configure DNS:

  1. Navigate to Templates > IPAM/DNS Profiles and create a DNS profile by selecting the DNS type in the Type drop-down menu.

  2. Add one or more DNS Service Domain names. NSX Advanced Load Balancer will be the authoritative DNS server for these domains.

  3. Configure a TTL value for all records for a particular domain, or leave the Default Record TTL for all Domains field blank to accept the default TTL of 300 seconds.

  4. Click SAVE.

Using NSX Advanced Load Balancer DNS

After configuring a DNS profile (above) with a set of domains for which NSX Advanced Load Balancer DNS will be serving records, configure a DNS virtual service in NSX Advanced Load Balancer for applications to discover each other. This serves two purposes, DNS high availability, and interoperability with other DNS providers in the same cluster. For instance, Mesos-DNS.

Setting up DNS Virtual Service

  1. Create a DNS Pool with back-end servers consisting of all Controller IPs in the cluster, with the server port as 53.

    Note:

    If the Controllers are running on Mesos nodes with Mesos DNS enabled, use port 8053.

  2. Create a virtual service with the following attributes:

    1. Publicly-accessible virtual IP address.

    2. System-DNS as the Application Profile.

    3. Select the Ignore network reachability constraints for the server pool check box.

    4. If the Controller is on an external network (requires routing for SE data traffic to reach the Controller), then add a static route to the Controller network as shown below.

  3. To add a static route (when the Controller is in an external network), navigate to Infrastructure > Cloud Resources > VRF Context. Click CREATE. Navigate to the Static Route tab and add a Default-Gateway IP address for the cluster.

  4. There are 2 ways to enable NSX Advanced Load Balancer DNS service in your data center.

    • Add DNS VIP (“10.160.160.100” as configured above) to the nameservers list in /etc/resolv.conf on all nodes requiring service discovery. Create applications and verify resolution works for the application’s FQDN by issuing dig app-name.domain anywhere in the cluster.

    • Add DNS VIP in the corporate DNS server as the nameserver for serving domain names configured in the DNS profile above. Any requests to mycompany-cloud will be redirected to and serviced by the NSX Advanced Load Balancer DNS service.