In this migration, the migration coordinator performs a cutover of the north-south traffic from the NSX Data Center for vSphere Edge Services Gateways to the NSX-T Data Center Edges. This migration mode is specific to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) only.

During the cutover, the uplinks on the NSX-v Distributed Logical Router are internally disconnected from the Transit Logical Switch to which the Edge Services Gateways are also connected. The uplinks on the NSX-T Edge nodes are brought online.

If your NSX-v environment has DHCP service configured on an Edge Services Gateway, the DHCP leases of the workload VMs are migrated to the NSX-T Edge during the Edge cutover. After the Edge cutover is finished, the workload VMs, which are still running on NSX-v prepared hosts, have the same DHCP leases as existed before the migration.

Remember that this migration mode does not migrate the existing NSX-v topology and logical configurations, such as routing, Edge firewall, distributed firewall, L3 networking services, and so on, to your new NSX-T environment. You must pre-configure the topology and the logical objects manually in your new NSX-T environment. Or migrate the logical configurations to NSX-T before starting the Edge cutover migration.

This migration mode does not do an in-place migration of your existing NSX-v hosts to NSX-T. You must migrate the existing hosts to NSX-T after the Edge cutover migration is finished.

Note: To use the Edge cutover migration mode, your NSX-v environment can be configured in any topology. In other words, the Edge cutover migration does not require the NSX-v topology to be mandatorily configured in any of the supported migration topologies that are explained in Topologies Supported by Migration Coordinator.

Prerequisites for Edge Cutover Migration

  • Supported software version requirements:
    • NSX-v versions 6.4.4, 6.4.5, 6.4.6, 6.4.8 and later are supported.
    • NSX-T Data Center version 3.1.1.
    • See the VMware Product Interoperability Matrices for required versions of vCenter Server and ESXi.
    • vSphere Distributed Switch versions 6.5.0, 6.6.0, and 7.0 are supported.
    • The NSX-v environment must match the NSX-T system requirements for ESXi, vCenter Server, and vSphere Distributed Switch.
  • A new NSX-T Data Center is deployed and configured for this migration.
    • Deploy NSX Manager appliances.

      In a production environment, add an NSX Manager cluster with three appliances. However, for migration purposes, a single NSX Manager appliance is adequate.

    • Deploy a vCenter Server appliance.

      The vCenter Server must be added as a compute manager in NSX-T. You can share the vCenter Server that is used in NSX-v or deploy another one in NSX-T.

    • Deploy the correct number of appropriately sized NSX-T Edge appliances to replace the NSX-v Edge Service Gateways to match it feature wise and performance wise. You can deploy the NSX Edge nodes on the existing NSX-v prepared hosts.
    • Join the Edge nodes to the management plane from the command line.
    • Configure NSX-T on the NSX Edge nodes.
    • Either create an NSX-T IP pool to use for the NSX-T Edge TEPs, or configure static IP addresses for the Edge TEPs.
    • Add tier-0 and tier-1 gateways depending on the requirements of your NSX-T network topology.
    • Create overlay segments in NSX-T with the same virtual network identifier (VNI) and subnet address as the Logical Switches in NSX-v.

      Use the NSX-T APIs to create the overlay segments. You cannot create overlay segments with the same VNI in the NSX Manager UI.

    • Create VLAN segments in NSX-T with the same VLAN IDs and subnet address as the VLAN Distributed Virtual Port Groups (DVPG) in NSX-v.
      Note: VLAN DVPG must be associated only with a VLAN ID. VLAN Trunk is not supported.
    • Connect the uplink interface of the tier-0 gateway to a transit VLAN segment.

      Configure dynamic route peering between tier-0 gateway and the north-facing physical routers.

    • Attach the NSX-T overlay segments to the downlinks of the tier-0 or tier-1 gateway depending on the requirements of your NSX-T topology.
    • For all Layer 3 services, such as Network Address Translation, Load Balancing, VPN, and so on, that are configured on the NSX-v Edge Services Gateway, pre-configure equivalent services on the tier-0 or tier-1 gateway of your NSX-T environment. Enable Route Advertisement and Layer 3 services on the tier-1 gateway. Enable Route Redistribution Status on the tier-0 gateway.
      Important: If a DHCP service is configured on your NSX-v Edge Services Gateway, pre-configure a Gateway DHCP service on the NSX-T overlay segment. For migrating DHCP leases, Edge cutover migration mode supports only Gateway DHCP service. Local DHCP server or Local DHCP relay is not supported.
    • The DPDK fast path uplink interfaces on the NSX-T edges (fp-eth0, fp-eth1, and fp-eth2) must be down.

      Use the NSX-T APIs to update the admin_status parameter of each DPDK fast path interface on the Edge transport node to down.

      For example, to change the admin_status parameter of fp-eth0 interface on the Edge transport node, run the following APIs:
      1. Retrieve the edge-id of the NSX-T Edge transport node:

        GET https://{nsxt-mgr-ip}/api/v1/transport-nodes

      2. Use the edge-id that you obtained in step 1 to retrieve the properties of the fp-eth0 network interface:

        GET https://{nsxt-mgr-ip}/api/v1/transport-nodes/{edge-id}/node/network/interfaces/fp-eth0

      3. Paste the full GET API response in a text editor and change the admin_status parameter to down.
      4. Paste the full edited API response in the request body of the PUT API:

        PUT https://{nsxt-mgr-ip}/api/v1/transport-nodes/{edge-id}/node/network/interfaces/fp-eth0

      For a detailed information about the parameters in these APIs, see the NSX-T Data Center API Guide.