NSX Application Platform System Requirements

Minimum System Requirements

In addition to the information listed in NSX Application Platform Deployment Prerequisites, use the following table as a guide when working with your infrastructure administrator to prepare for deploying the NSX Application Platform and the NSX features hosted on the platform. The form factor you select determines which NSX features you can activate or install on the platform.

Before you deploy the NSX Application Platform, determine the size of the VMware TKG Cluster on Supervisor or upstream Kubernetes cluster and the minimum number of nodes that your infrastructure administrator must allocate.

Table 1: Minimum System Requirements

Form Factor

Form Factor	Minimum and Recommended # of Nodes in a TKG Cluster on Supervisor or Upstream Kubernetes Cluster	vCPU	Memory	Storage	Ephemeral Storage	Supported NSX Features
Standard	A minimum of 1 control plane node is required but 3 control plane nodes are recommended. 3 or more worker nodes (See the Important note in the About the support for a minimum of 3 worker nodes section later in this topic.)	2 vCPUs for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using `guaranteed-small` VM) 4 vCPU per worker node	4 GB RAM for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using `guaranteed-small` VM) 16 GB RAM per worker node	200 GB per NSX Application Platform instance (See more information later in this topic.)	64 GB	NSX Network Detection and Response NSX Malware Prevention NSX Metrics (See the Important Note later in this topic.)
Advanced	A minimum of 1 control plane node is required but 3 control plane nodes are recommended. 3 or more worker nodes (See the Important note in the About the support for a minimum of 3 worker nodes section later in this topic.)	2 vCPUs for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using `guaranteed-small` VM) 16 vCPU per worker node	4 GB RAM for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using `guaranteed-small` VM) 64 GB RAM per worker node	1 TB per NSX Application Platform instance (See more information later in this topic.)	64 GB	NSX Intelligence NSX Network Detection and Response NSX Malware Prevention NSX Metrics (See the Important Note later in this topic.)
Evaluation (See the following *Note for Evaluation Form Factor.)	1 control plane node and 1 worker node	2 vCPUs for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using `guaranteed-small` VM) 16 vCPU per worker node	4 GB RAM for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using `guaranteed-small` VM) 64 GB RAM per worker node	1 TB per NSX Application Platform instance	64 GB	NSX Intelligence NSX Network Detection and Response NSX Malware Prevention NSX Metrics

Minimum and Recommended # of Nodes in a TKG Cluster on Supervisor or Upstream Kubernetes Cluster

vCPU

Memory

Storage

Ephemeral Storage

Supported NSX Features

Standard

A minimum of 1 control plane node is required but 3 control plane nodes are recommended.
3 or more worker nodes (See the Important note in the About the support for a minimum of 3 worker nodes section later in this topic.)

2 vCPUs for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using guaranteed-small VM)
4 vCPU per worker node

4 GB RAM for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using guaranteed-small VM)
16 GB RAM per worker node

200 GB per NSX Application Platform instance

(See more information later in this topic.)

64 GB

NSX Network Detection and Response
NSX Malware Prevention
NSX Metrics

(See the Important Note later in this topic.)

Advanced

A minimum of 1 control plane node is required but 3 control plane nodes are recommended.
3 or more worker nodes (See the Important note in the About the support for a minimum of 3 worker nodes section later in this topic.)

2 vCPUs for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using guaranteed-small VM)
16 vCPU per worker node

4 GB RAM for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using guaranteed-small VM)
64 GB RAM per worker node

1 TB per NSX Application Platform instance

(See more information later in this topic.)

64 GB

NSX Intelligence
NSX Network Detection and Response
NSX Malware Prevention
NSX Metrics

(See the Important Note later in this topic.)

Evaluation

(See the following *Note for Evaluation Form Factor.)

1 control plane node and 1 worker node

2 vCPUs for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using guaranteed-small VM)
16 vCPU per worker node

4 GB RAM for the control plane node (See more information later in this topic about using guaranteed-small VM)
64 GB RAM per worker node

1 TB per NSX Application Platform instance

64 GB

NSX Intelligence
NSX Network Detection and Response
NSX Malware Prevention
NSX Metrics

About the support for a minimum of 3 worker nodes

Important:

When using a minimum of 3 Advanced Form Factor worker nodes in a TKG Cluster on Supervisor or Upstream Kubernetes Cluster, only the following NSX features that are hosted on the NSX Application Platform can be activated.

NSX Intelligence
NSX Metrics for NSX Application Platform (activated by default)

To activate the following NSX features, in addition to NSX Intelligence and NSX Metrics for NSX Application Platform, a minimum of 4 worker nodes in the guest cluster is required.

NSX Network Detection and Response
NSX Suspicious Traffic for Network Traffic Analysis
NSX Malware Prevention
NSX Metrics

All the supported features listed in Table 1: Minimum System Requirements for the Standard Form Factor size can be activated on a 3-worker node guest cluster.

About the Evaluation Form Factor

The Evaluation form factor is applicable only in non-production deployments for use in evaluations or demonstrations. It has limited data retention, no scale out or high availability support, and no support for upgrades. If you want to run multiple services on the Evaluation form factor for an extended period of time, increase the worker node resources to 24 vCPU and 128 GB of RAM. If necessary, contact VMware support for more sizing details.

Availability and Resiliency Best Practices

To avoid data loss when the worker nodes fail, do not use the storage classes that have any persistence volume local to the worker nodes. Consider using a remote, independent, and distributed storage class, such as VMware vSAN volumes.

Important Note for Production Deployments:

The following best practices apply to any production deployment for either Standard or Advanced form factors.

For increased availability and resiliency, 3 control plane nodes are required.
VM classes used for the NSX Application Platform control plane nodes and worker nodes must use a guaranteed reservation of 100% for CPU and Memory resources to avoid any resource overcommitment.

There must be no resource contention for Storage I/O operations per second (IOPS) or Network bandwidth. The vSphere Storage and Network I/O Control are platform features that can help prioritize resources for the NSX Application Platform.

Load Balancing Requirement

When deploying the NSX Application Platform, you must configure your TKG Cluster on Supervisor or upstream Kubernetes cluster to have a load balancer (LB) IP pool with at least five IP addresses. To finish an NSX Application Platform deployment successfully, the platform requires at least five available IP addresses. If you plan to scale out your NSX Application Platform deployment later, your TKG Cluster on Supervisor or Kubernetes cluster LB IP pool must contain one more IP address per Kubernetes node used by the platform. Consider configuring your TKG Cluster on Supervisor or upstream Kubernetes cluster LB IP pool with a total of 15 IP addresses, since VMware only supports a maximum of 10 additional Kubernetes nodes after scaling out the platform.

Additional Volume Requirement

For NSX Application Platform, your guest cluster worker nodes require an additional volume of at least 64 GiB for ephemeral storage.

To specify the disk and storage parameters for each node type, use the information in the following table. For more information, see the v1alpha3 Example: TKC with Default Storage and Node Volumes topic in the Using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 on Supervisor with vSphere with Tanzu 8 documentation.

Table 2: Volume Requirement

Node Type	Volume Name	Volume Capacity	Volume mountPath
Worker Node	containerd	64 GiB	/var/lib/containerd

Control Plane Node Size Requirement

If you are deploying the NSX Application Platform and NSX features, like NSX Intelligence, on a TKG Cluster on Supervisor, the default virtual machine class type of guaranteed-small size (2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM) might not be sufficient for the TKG Cluster on Supervisor control plane node. Consider using the following class type that has a bigger size for the upstream Kubernetes cluster or TKG Cluster on Supervisor control plane node.

guaranteed-medium (2 vCPUs and 8 GB RAM)

Consult the Virtual Machine Classes for Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters documentation for more information.