The following subsections describe cluster requirements for NSX appliances and provides recommendations for specific site deployments.

Cluster Requirements

  • In a production environment, the NSX Manager (Local Manager in an NSX Federation environment) or Global Manager cluster must have three members to avoid an outage to the management and control planes.

    Each cluster member should be placed on a unique hypervisor host with three physical hypervisor hosts in total. This is required to avoid a single physical hypervisor host failure impacting the NSX control plane. It is recommended you apply anti-affinity rules to ensure that all three cluster members are running on different hosts.

    The normal production operating state is a three-node cluster of the NSX Manager (Local Manager in an NSX Federation environment) or Global Manager. However, you can add additional, temporary nodes to allow for IP address changes.

    Important: As of NSX-T Data Center 2.4, the NSX Manager contains the NSX Central Control Plane process. This service is critical for the operation of NSX. If there is a complete loss of NSX Managers, or if the cluster is reduced from three NSX Managers to one NSX Manager, you will not be able to make topology changes to your environment, and vMotion of machines depending on NSX will fail.

  • For lab and proof-of-concept deployments where there are no production workloads, you can run a single NSX Manager or Global Manager to save resources. NSX Manager or Global Manager nodes can be deployed on either ESXi or KVM. However, mixed deployments of managers on both ESXi and KVM are not supported.

  • If you deploy a single NSX Manager or Global Manager in a production environment, ensure that you enable vSphere HA on the host cluster for the manager node. For more information on vSphere HA, see the vSphere Availability guide in the vSphere Documentation Center.

Recovery with vSphere HA

You can use vSphere HA (High Availability) with NSX-T Data Center to enable quick recovery if the host running the NSX Manager node fails. See Creating and Using vSphere HA Clusters in the vSphere product documentation.