NSX Federation introduces some new terms and concepts, such as remote tunnel endpoint (RTEP), span, and region.

Federation Systems: Global Manager and Local Manager

A Federation environment includes two types of management systems:

  • Global Manager: a system similar to NSX Manager that federates multiple Local Managers.

  • Local Manager: an NSX Manager system in charge of network and security services for a location.

Federation Span: Local and Stretched

When you create a networking object from Global Manager, it can span one or more locations.
  • Local: the object spans only one location.
  • Stretched: the object spans more than one location.

You do not directly configure the span of a segment. A segment has the same span as the gateway it is attached to.

Federation Regions

Security objects have a region. The region can be one of the following:
  • Location: a region is automatically created for each location. This region has the span of that location.
  • Global: a region that has the span of all available locations.
  • Custom Region: you can create regions that include a subset of the available locations.

Federation Tunnel Endpoints

In a Federation environment, there are two types of tunnel endpoints.
  • Tunnel End Point (TEP): the IP address of a transport node (Edge node or Host) used for Geneve encapsulation within a location.
  • Remote Tunnel End Points (RTEP): the IP address of a transport node (Edge node only) used for Geneve encapsulation across locations.