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.

Physical Server Concepts:

• Application - represents the actual application running on the physical server server, such as a web server or a data base server.
• Application Interface - represents the network interface card (NIC) which the application uses for sending and receiving traffic. One application interface per physical server server is supported.
• Management Interface - represents the NIC which manages the physical server server.
• VIF - the peer of the application interface which is attached to the logical switch. This is similar to a VM vNIC.

NSX supports the physical server server in two ways: as a host transport node and as a host for NSX Manager.

Make sure that you have the supported physical server server versions. See Bare Metal Server System Requirements.

Note: If your NSX Edges are in VM form factor and you intend to use the NSX DHCP service (deployed on VLAN-based logical switch), you must set the forged transmits option to Accept on the physical server hosts on which the NSX Edges are deployed. See seciton on Forged Transmits in the vSphere product documentation.