Next step in my VCF on VCF journey is building the networking between the two environments. Of course, I have my trusted pfSense appliances that do the routing, but of course, I want to be able to create my own NSX-based virtual network. So the first steps are to create a little design on what I want to accomplish. So in the first phase, I will be creating Edge Node clusters on both VCF WLD’s and configuring BGP between them, for dynamic routing. I will not be using the pfSense appliances for now, just a direct connection, based on the NSX-components, with stretched VLAN’s as a transportation layer.

So both VCF instances will be directly connected to each other, like so:

And routing between the different VLAN’s will look like this:

I chose to deploy the Edge Node Cluster, through VCF. In order to do this, we go through a wizard. In this, you setup all the configuration.

There are a couple of requirements here:

• DNS entries for the Edge Nodes
• Routing between the Host TEP addresses and the Edge TEP addresses

After this is configured, we go through the wizard. It can be found within the WLD, where we can click: Add Edge Node Cluster:

We accept the prerequisites:

Then we fill out all the information, we have designed in the pictures above, leading to the following summary:

and have it validated:

And when we click Finish, it starts deploying:

Good thing to note is the amount of resources available in the target cluster. My hosts, with 32 GB of memory, were not able to power on the Edge Node (that contained 8 GB of memory):

and in SDDC Manager:

So I increased the host memory to 48 GB for all hosts in the cluster and restarted the task:

From there, the deploy went okay, but it failed again at the verification of the BGP connectivity. Which makes sense, since I have only deployed one site, and since I am doing an NSX-NSX connection, the other side is not available yet. So I decided to pause on VCF01 and configure VCF02, in order for VCF01 to continue when VCF02 is available for BGP connections.

So I go through the same Wizard, on the second VCF environment (after first increasing the memory on the hosts in the WLD02-CL01 cluster).

And when the task has created the BGP connections on the second VCF, the connections are up:

Next failure I ran into, was the task “Verify BGP Route Distribution”. Because neither NSX environment has routes to distribute, this makes sense:

So to overcome this issue, I created a Test-segment on both NSX environments:

and see that that is distributed:

When I restart the task, it finishes successfully.

So after VCF02 has finished deploying, I can restart VCF01 and have that finish successfully as well (I chose to wait until VCF02 is finished, to make sure it doesn’t fail because of conflicting actions).

And that concludes deploying the Edge Cluster through the SDDC Manager, including the T0’s and a T1 per NSX-environment. Next up, the Aria Suite.