Create Groups from Global Manager that apply globally across your NSX deployments or cover selected locations or regions.

Group Span

When you create a group from the Global Manager, you select a region for the group. The group is synced with all locations in that region. A global region containing all locations, and a region for each location that has been added to the Global Manager are available automatically as regions you can select for a group's span. You can create customized regions before you create groups. See Create a Region from Global Manager.

In this example, Group1 is created in the Global region, and is therefore synced with all Local Managers.

This diagram shows the span of groups created from the Global Manager and pushed to all three Local Managers registered with it.

Dynamic Groups

If a group that spans more than one location has dynamic membership, you need information from each location to list the group membership.

In this example, Group1 has the following members:
  • VM1 in Location1
  • VM2 in Location2
  • VM3 in Location3

Each Local Manager syncs its dynamic group membership with the other Local Managers. As a result, each Local Manager has a complete list of group members.

This diagram shows that groups created in any Local Manager are synced with all the other Local Managers.

Nested Groups

For groups created from the Global Manager, you can add another group as a member if it has an equal or smaller span than the group's region.
Note: If you are using NSX version 3.0.0, you can add a group as a member of another group only if the span of both the groups is exactly the same.

Extending the example using Region1 that contains Location2 and Location3, note the following additional configurations:

Task Effect
From Global Manager, create Group-Loc2 with region Location2.
  • Group-Loc2 is created in Global Manager.
  • Group-Loc2 is created in the Local Manager Location2.
From Global Manager, create group Group-Region1 with region Region1. Add Group-Loc2 as a member.

This is a nested group.
  • Group-Region1 is created in Global Manager.
  • Group-Region1 is created in Location2 and Location3.
  • Group-Loc2 is created in Local Manager Location3.
From Global Manager, navigate to Inventory > Regions and edit Region1 to remove Location2. This action is not allowed because of the nested group Group-Region1.

See Add a Group for detailed steps for creating groups.