In this model, you dedicate a vSphere cluster for hosting the NSX Edge devices of the workload domain. When you plan to expand the physical infrastructure that is available for workloads, you place any new NSX edge devices on this cluster.

As you deploy building blocks, you either reuse existing NSX Edge devices or deploy additional NSX Edge devices for a building block directly on the dedicated edge cluster for handling the north-south traffic in to and out of the SDN for workloads deployed on the new block.

Figure 1. Dedicated Edge Cluster Model


Considerations

  • The first compute cluster in a workload domain is not required to perform any ingress and egress traffic.

  • The dedicated edge cluster becomes the single point of physical to logical network transition which might simplify the security aspect of controlling traffic into and out of the environment.

  • You can consolidate high-bandwidth uplinks into a smaller set of hosts, and reduce the potential for resource contention between the NSX Edge devices and the workloads.

  • Evaluate the benefits of placing all the edge devices in a single fault domain compared to distributing them across all compute clusters and multiple fault domains.

  • This design is suitable for environments with the following requirements:

    • Transports zones span several clusters.

    • Workload mobility between those clusters is required without increasing the routing cost to reach the gateway for the workloads and the need to change the IP addresses of the workloads .

  • Compared to a shared edge compute cluster model, a workload will not have to contend for compute or bandwidth resources on a host running edge gateways.

  • In an environment that uses NSX for vSphere, a dedicated edge cluster design might be a more costly solution when adding workload domains because of the need to allocate a dedicated edge cluster for each workload domain.