Key Concepts

The common NSX-T Data Center concepts that are used in the documentation and user interface.

Compute Manager: A compute manager is an application that manages resources such as hosts and VMs. One example is vCenter Server.
Control Plane: Computes runtime state based on configuration from the management plane. Control plane disseminates topology information reported by the data plane elements, and pushes stateless configuration to forwarding engines.
Data Plane: Performs stateless forwarding or transformation of packets based on tables populated by the control plane. Data plane reports topology information to the control plane and maintains packet level statistics.
External Network: A physical network or VLAN not managed by NSX-T Data Center. You can link your logical network or overlay network to an external network through an NSX Edge. For example, a physical network in a customer data center or a VLAN in a physical environment.
Logical Port Egress: Outbound network traffic leaving the VM or logical network is called egress because traffic is leaving virtual network and entering the data center.
Logical Port Ingress: Inbound network traffic leaving the data center and entering the VM is called ingress traffic.
Logical Router: NSX-T Data Center routing entity.
Logical Router Port: Logical network port to which you can attach a logical switch port or an uplink port to a physical network.
Logical Switch: Entity that provides virtual Layer 2 switching for VM interfaces and Gateway interfaces. A logical switch gives tenant network administrators the logical equivalent of a physical Layer 2 switch, allowing them to connect a set of VMs to a common broadcast domain. A logical switch is a logical entity independent of the physical hypervisor infrastructure and spans many hypervisors, connecting VMs regardless of their physical location.
In a multi-tenant cloud, many logical switches might exist side-by-side on the same hypervisor hardware, with each Layer 2 segment isolated from the others. Logical switches can be connected using logical routers, and logical routers can provide uplink ports connected to the external physical network.
Logical Switch Port: Logical switch attachment point to establish a connection to a virtual machine network interface or a logical router interface. The logical switch port reports applied switching profile, port state, and link status.
Management Plane: Provides single API entry point to the system, persists user configuration, handles user queries, and performs operational tasks on all of the management, control, and data plane nodes in the system. Management plane is also responsible for querying, modifying, and persisting use configuration.
NSX Edge Cluster: Collection of NSX Edge node appliances that have the same settings as protocols involved in high-availability monitoring.
NSX Edge Node: Component with the functional goal is to provide computational power to deliver the IP routing and the IP services functions.
NSX Managed Virtual Distributed Switch or KVM Open vSwitch: The NSX managed virtual distributed switch (N-VDS, previously known as hostswitch)or OVS is used for shared NSX Edge and compute cluster. N-VDS is required for overlay traffic configuration.
An N-VDS has two modes: standard and enhanced datapath. An enhanced datapath N-VDS has the performance capabilities to support NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) workloads.
NSX Manager: Node that hosts the API services, the management plane, and the agent services. NSX Manager is an appliance included in the NSX-T Data Center installation package. You can deploy the appliance in the role of NSX Manager or nsx-cloud-service-manager. Currently, the appliance only supports one role at a time.
NSX Manager Cluster: A cluster of NSX Managers that can provide high availability.
Open vSwitch (OVS): Open source software switch that acts as a virtual switch within XenServer, Xen, KVM, and other Linux-based hypervisors.
Overlay Logical Network: Logical network implemented using Layer 2-in-Layer 3 tunneling such that the topology seen by VMs is decoupled from that of the physical network.
Physical Interface (pNIC): Network interface on a physical server that a hypervisor is installed on.
Segment: Entity that provides virtual Layer 2 switching for VM interfaces and Gateway interfaces. A segment gives tenant network administrators the logical equivalent of a physical Layer 2 switch, allowing them to connect a set of VMs to a common broadcast domain. A segment is a logical entity independent of the physical hypervisor infrastructure and spans many hypervisors, connecting VMs regardless of their physical location. A segment is also known as a logical switch.
In a multi-tenant cloud, many segments might exist side-by-side on the same hypervisor hardware, with each Layer 2 segment isolated from the others. Segments can be connected using gateways, which can provide connectivity to the external physical network.

Tier-0 Gateway or Tier-0 Logical Router: The Tier-0 Gateway in the Networking tab interfaces with the physical network and can be realized as an active-active or active-standby cluster. The Tier-0 gateway runs BGP and peers with physical routers. In active-standby mode the gateway can also provide stateful services.
Tier-1 Gateway or Tier-1 Logical Router: The Tier-1 Gateway in the Networking tab connects to one Tier-0 gateway for northbound connectivity and one or more overlay networks for southbound connectivity. A Tier-1 gateway can be an active-standby cluster that provides stateful services.
Transport Zone: Collection of transport nodes that defines the maximum span for logical switches. A transport zone represents a set of similarly provisioned hypervisors and the logical switches that connect VMs on those hypervisors. It also has been registered with the NSX-T Data Center management plane and has NSX-T Data Center modules installed. For a hypervisor host or NSX Edge to be part of the NSX-T Data Center overlay, it must be added to the NSX-T Data Center transport zone.
Transport Node: A node capable of participating in an NSX-T Data Center overlay or NSX-T Data Center VLAN networking. For a KVM host, you can preconfigure the N-VDS, or you can have NSX Manager perform the configuration. For an ESXi host, NSX Manager always configures the N-VDS.
Uplink Profile: Defines policies for the links from hypervisor hosts to NSX-T Data Center logical switches or from NSX Edge nodes to top-of-rack switches. The settings defined by uplink profiles might include teaming policies, active/standby links, the transport VLAN ID, and the MTU setting. The transport VLAN set in the uplink profile tags overlay traffic only and the VLAN ID is used by the TEP endpoint.
VM Interface (vNIC): Network interface on a virtual machine that provides connectivity between the virtual guest operating system and the standard vSwitch or vSphere distributed switch. The vNIC can be attached to a logical port. You can identify a vNIC based on its Unique ID (UUID).
Virtual Tunnel Endpoint: Each hypervisor has a Virtual Tunnel Endpoint (VTEP) responsible for encapsulating the VM traffic inside a VLAN header and routing the packet to a destination VTEP for further processing. Traffic can be routed to another VTEP on a different host or the NSX Edge gateway to access the physical network.