A transport zone controls which hosts a logical switch can reach and can span one or more vSphere clusters. Transport zones dictate which clusters and, therefore, which VMs can participate in the use of a particular network. Universal transport zones can span vSphere cluster across a cross-vCenter NSX environment.

You can have only one universal transport zone in a cross-vCenter NSX environment.

Prerequisites

Determine the appropriate NSX Manager on which to make your changes.
  • In a standalone or single vCenter NSX environment there is only one NSX Manager so you do not need to select one.
  • Universal objects must be managed from the primary NSX Manager.
  • Objects local to an NSX Manager must be managed from that NSX Manager.
  • In a cross-vCenter NSX environment that does not have Enhanced Linked Mode enabled, you must make configuration changes from the vCenter linked to the NSX Manager that you want to modify.
  • In a cross-vCenter NSX environment in Enhanced Linked Mode, you can make configuration changes to any NSX Manager from any linked vCenter. Select the appropriate NSX Manager from the NSX Manager drop-down menu.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to logical network settings.
    • In NSX 6.4.1 and later, navigate to Networking & Security > Installation and Upgrade > Logical Network Settings.
    • In NSX 6.4.0, navigate to Networking & Security > Installation and Upgrade > Logical Network Preparation.
  2. Click Transport Zones, and then click Add.
  3. (Optional) If you want to configure this transport zone as a universal transport zone, make the following selection.
    • In NSX 6.4.1 and later, click the Universal Synchronization button to turn the setting on.
    • In NSX 6.4.0, select Mark this object for Universal Synchronization.
  4. Select the replication mode:
    • Multicast: Multicast IP addresses in the physical network are used for the control plane. This mode is recommended only when you are upgrading from older VXLAN deployments. Requires PIM/IGMP in the physical network.
    • Unicast: The control plane is handled by an NSX Controller. All unicast traffic leverages optimized head-end replication. No multicast IP addresses or special network configuration is required.
    • Hybrid: Offloads local traffic replication to the physical network (L2 multicast). This requires IGMP snooping on the first-hop switch and access to an IGMP querier in each VTEP subnet, but does not require PIM. The first-hop switch handles traffic replication for the subnet.
    Important:

    If you create a universal transport zone and select hybrid as the replication mode, you must ensure that the multicast address used does not conflict with any other multicast addresses assigned on any NSX Manager in the environment.

  5. Select the clusters to add to the transport zone

Results

Transport-Zone is a transport zone local to the NSX Manager on which it was created.

Universal-Transport-Zone is a universal transport zone which is available on all NSX Managers in a cross-vCenter NSX environment.

Transport Zones

What to do next

If you added a transport zone, you can add logical switches.

If you added a universal transport zone, you can add universal logical switches.

If you added a universal transport zone, you can select the secondary NSX Managers and add their clusters to the universal transport zone.