You can prepare ESXi hosts and physical servers as NSX transport nodes. Before you prepare physical servers for NSX networking, ensure the required third-party packages are installed on hosts.
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Manual Installation of NSX Kernel Modules As an alternative to using the NSX UI or the POST /api/v1/transport-nodes API (deprecated) API or PUT /api/v1/infra/sites/side-id/enforcement-points/enforcement-point-id/host-transport-nodes/ API, you can install NSX kernel modules manually from the hypervisor command line.
Preparing Physical Servers as NSX Transport Nodes To use NSX on a physical server (also known as Bare Metal server), you must install supported third-party packages.
Preparing ESXi Hosts as Transport Nodes After you create transport zones, IP pools, uplink profiles for transport nodes, prepare a host as a transport node. An ESXi or Bare Metal (physical server) can be prepared as a transport node. ESXi hosts only support vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS), while Physical servers only support N-VDS host switch type.
Managing Transport Nodes After preparing hosts as transport nodes, you can view status of hosts, switch visualization, and other configuration settings related to transport nodes. You can use it to debug issues if the host transport node is in a degraded or failed state.