There are two options for managing NSX-T Data Center across multiple locations.

Table 1. Comparison of Multisite and NSX Federation
Multisite NSX Federation
Availability NSX-T Data Center 2.3 NSX-T Data Center 3.0
Environments Two locations in metropolitan regions (<10 ms across locations) with stretched VLAN Other use cases
Number of NSX Manager clusters 1 1 per location
Network Services

All features supported:

  • Switching (Overlay and VLAN)
  • IPAM (DHCP and DNS)
  • Routing (VRF, EVPN, NAT and route redistribution)
  • Layer4+ services (Load Balancing, VPN)

All features supported from GM:

  • Switching (Overlay and VLAN)
  • IPAM (DHCP Relay and static binding, and DNS)
  • L2-Bridge (Starting in 3.2.2 and later 3.2.x releases)
  • Routing (NAT and route redistribution)
  • Routing protocols (BGP, Static)

Exceptions:

  • T0-VRF
  • DHCP dynamic binding
  • Routing protocols (OSPF)
  • Routing VPN and EVPN
  • Load Balancing
Security Services

All features supported:

  • Distributed Firewall
  • Gateway Firewall
  • FQDN Filtering
  • L7 App ID context support
  • Time-Based Firewall
  • Identity Firewall
  • Distributed IDS
  • Malware Prevention
  • Network Introspection
  • Endpoint Protection

All features supported from GM:

  • Distributed Firewall
  • Gateway Firewall
  • FQDN Filtering
  • L7 App ID context support

Exceptions:

  • Time-Based Firewall
  • Identity Firewall
  • Distributed IDS
  • Malware Prevention
  • Network Introspection and Endpoint Protection
High-Availability for Management Plane

NSX Manager VMs recovery

NSX-T Data Center GM and LM VMs recovery with SRM from NSX-T Data Center 3.0.2
High-Availability for Compute VMs

Compute VMs recovery

Compute VMs recovery

  • With SRM from NSX-T Data Center 3.1.0 with one limitation: DistributTaged Firewall on Workload VMs cannot be based on NSX-T Data Center tags.
  • With SRM from NSX-T Data Center 3.2.0 without any limitations.

Also see the NSX-T Data Center Multi-location Design Guide and VMware Site Recovery Manager.