Virtual or bare-metal appliance for NSX functions that hypervisors cannot run in a distributed way, for example north-south routing, NAT, Tier-0 gateways and load balancing. Several form an Edge cluster.
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Terms in this definition
- NSX
Software that handles networking and security across VCF, covering firewalling, load balancing, NAT, VPCs, overlay segments and Tier-0/1 gateways.
- Geographic
A Traffic Manager routing method that picks the endpoint according to where the user is located geographically.
- Azure NAT Gateway
Gives every resource in a subnet a managed way out to the internet through one or more fixed public IP addresses, while accepting no unsolicited inbound connections. Azure Container Apps can use it only when the environment is a workload profiles one.
- ELT
Extract, load, transform: raw data lands in the target system first and is transformed there. See ETL for the opposite order.
Related terms
- Active/standby Tier-0
Required by the VPC with Full Services model (itself needed for automatic VPC SNAT and all VCF Automation tenancy models), this Tier-0 HA mode sends all traffic through one elected NSX Edge node, with a second ready to take over on failure. More north-south capacity therefore means adding Tier-0 or VRF gateways, not edge nodes.
- Dual Availability Zone Design based on NSX Edge Node HA
Unlike the vSphere HA recovery design, where edges migrate between zones, this two-zone NSX Edge cluster model fixes each edge node to one zone, on either a per-zone vSphere cluster or a stretched vSAN cluster. Edge VLANs stay local and BGP peers only with that zone's top-of-rack switches, while NSX Edge node HA and BFD provide rapid failover and the strongest fault isolation.
- TEP
Short for tunnel endpoint: the interface on an NSX Edge node or ESX host where Geneve overlay tunnels begin and end. Addresses can be static, from DHCP or from an IP pool.
- TEP group
Grouping of an NSX Edge node's TEPs so overlay flows are load-balanced across them, switched on globally with the NSX API. Recommended for greater single-edge throughput and resilience when a link is up yet not forwarding.