Controller clusters provide high availability (HA), redundancy, and increased analytic workload scale.

Controllers communicate with each other over a single management IP address, the Controller Cluster IP address. They also use this path to communicate with all SEs within the fabric.

Although Controllers do not have to exist within the same limitations, consider the following conditions:

  • Controllers must be within the same region (ideally the same data center). It helps synchronize the databases and perform actions such as log indexing and data retrieval.

  • Controllers have the option of sharing a cluster IP address. The cluster IP address is owned by the primary Controller within the cluster. To share an IP address, all Controllers must have a NIC in the same network.

  • Each Controller must have access to the IP addresses of other Controllers through configured network routes.

  • RTT (round-trip time) value between two Controller nodes must be less than 20 milliseconds.

Considerations

AWS

AWS Availability Zones (AZs) provide redundancy and separate fault domains. All AWS regions support a minimum of two AZs. To leverage HA provided by AWS AZs, it is recommended to deploy different NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller instances of a cluster in different AZs.

Azure

The Controller cluster must be running inside the Azure cloud. Additionally, consider the following information:

  • Azure credentials (username and password or application ID) which have contri butor privilege access over the Controller cluster VMs and AviController role access over the virtual network that is hosting the Controller cluster.

  • Subscription_id of the subscription where the Controller virtual machines are running.

OpenStack

OpenStack requires NSX Advanced Load Balancer to maintain a cluster IP address. So, NSX Advanced Load Balancer deployed into an OpenStack cloud does not support clustering of NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controllers present in different networks.