Option for running NSX Edges across two zones: edge nodes sit on a stretched vSAN cluster, and if a zone fails vSphere HA restarts them in the surviving one. Their management and uplink VLANs must span both zones, and compared with edge-node-level HA, recovery takes longer and faults are less contained.
Also called Dual Availability Zone Design based on vSphere HA Recovery.
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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.
- vSAN
VMware's software-defined storage, which combines local devices across a cluster's ESX hosts into one shared datastore. Available as OSA or ESA, VCF can use it as principal storage.
- vSphere HA
When a host fails, this cluster capability restarts its VMs elsewhere; through VM Component Protection and VM Monitoring it also reacts to storage and VM failures.
- Span
One operation inside a trace, such as a single LLM call or prompt flow node, carrying attributes plus start and end times. Nested spans reveal the order of calls.
Related terms
- BFD
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection quickly notices when a forwarding path breaks, letting an NSX Tier-0 gateway fail over its BGP sessions or static routes without waiting for hold timers to expire. Most VCF edge designs keep standard BGP timers alongside it; the exception is the dual-zone vSphere HA recovery design, which omits BFD, as vMotion can disrupt sessions, and shortens the timers instead.
- 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.