The NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance is a tool that simplifies provisioning the underlying Tanzu Supervisor Cluster and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Guest Clusters and deploying the NSX Application Platform.

NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance Topology

The appliance uses a prescriptive design of vSphere with Tanzu, leveraging VDS mode as the networking stack and HA Proxy as the load balancer.

A Supervisor cluster can deploy multiple guest clusters. An NSX Application Platform instance is mapped to a dedicated guest cluster, and multiple NSX Application Platform instances require multiple guest clusters.

An NSX Application Platform instance maps to a specific NSX Manager. Each instance can have an independent version, form factor, and number of nodes.

HA Proxy is deployed with a three NIC setup consisting of Management, Frontend, and Workload networks. NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance deploys a Tanzu Supervisor Cluster and one Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Guest Cluster per NSX Application Platform instance, appropriately sized to accommodate the NSX Application Platform requirements.

Note:

NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance supports only the below topology.

NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance topology showing the networking, guest cluster, and Supervisor cluster configuration.

Automated Deployment Process

The NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance collects environment configuration details and orchestrates preparing the environment, updating the configuration, and deploying the Tanzu with vSphere and the NSX Application Platform.

Automated Operations

  • Run vSphere environment pre-checks.

  • Create a vSphere content library with the required Tanzu images.

  • Deploy and configure the HA Proxy load balancer.

  • Manage HA Proxy certificates.

  • Activate workload management on a vSphere cluster.

  • Create the required VM classes.

  • Instantiate single or multiple NSX Application Platform guest cluster(s).

  • Retrieve the configuration for each guest cluster.

  • Update Helm charts and Docker registry.

  • Update NSX Application Platform tools on NSX if required.

  • Upload environment configuration file to NSX.

  • Run NSX Application Platform guest cluster pre-checks.

  • Deploy the NSX Application Platform.

Depending on your environment, the end-to-end automated deployment of the NSX Application Platform and vSphere with Tanzu takes approximately 50 minutes.

Note: After a successful installation, you can only scale-out or update the number of existing instances. See Managing NSX Application Platform Within the NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance.