Appliance that gives NSX external routing and hosts centralised services; it is deployed as a VM on ESX or on physical hardware. Tier-0 gateways need it, as do Tier-1 gateways running stateful services like NAT.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains NSX Edge in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
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.
- External
API Management virtual network mode in which the gateway stays public but can call private back ends inside the VNet.
- Geographic
A Traffic Manager routing method that picks the endpoint according to where the user is located geographically.
- ESX
VMware's bare-metal hypervisor, installed on each host in a VCF fleet. Up to version 9.0 it was known as ESXi.
- Physical
Describes the concrete, real-world parts that put a logical architecture into effect.
- LIKE
Compares strings with a pattern that can contain the % and _ wildcards. Because it only understands character patterns, searching big volumes of text this way is much slower than using full-text search.
- 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.
Related terms
- Dedicated vSphere Cluster for NSX Edge Node model
A VCF distributed switch layout for a vSphere cluster used solely for NSX Edge nodes, with each host having four physical NICs across two distributed switches and hosting two pinned edge nodes with dedicated uplinks. Edges get resources to themselves and maximum throughput, but more servers are needed.
- FIB
Forwarding information base: the lookup table an NSX Edge compiles from its RIB. It is one of the things the EdgeRouting ODS runbook examines, and VCF Operations for networks harvests the Edge routes held in it.
- Graceful restart
BGP can keep forwarding packets while a neighbour's control plane restarts. On NSX Edge nodes this defaults to helper only, and Tier-0 gateways are better without it because BFD-based convergence gets delayed.
- L4
Under 2 Gbps, a Medium NSX Edge is the suggested size for services from L2 to L4, for example routing, NAT, L4 load balancing and L4 firewalling. L4 is the OSI transport layer, where TCP and UDP ports live.
- L7
The OSI application layer. A Tier-1 gateway on a Small NSX Edge cannot realise NSX services that work here, such as TLS inspection, URL filtering and L7 load balancing; they need a Large edge, or Extra Large for more throughput.
- NSX Segment Scalable
A VPC-free workload networking model: Tier-1 gateways, ideally DR-only, attach directly to a stateless Active/Active Tier-0 spread over two to eight NSX Edge nodes. It is selected for centralised Tier-1 security services, NSX Federation stretch and north-south scale, though VKS and VCF Automation All Apps organizations are not supported.
- RTEP
Remote tunnel endpoint. VCF places this NSX Edge interface on its own VLAN, kept apart from the one used by edge overlay TEPs, and uses it to tunnel traffic with Geneve from one NSX Federation location to another; every Local Manager has an IP pool that supplies its addresses.
- service router
Runs on NSX Edge nodes as the centralised half of a gateway. Handles north-south routing and stateful features like NAT and VPN. A Tier-0 always includes one, but a Tier-1 only if an Edge cluster has been chosen. See also the distributed router (DR), present on all transport nodes.