I have struggled to understand the concepts of VMware NSX major functionality like NSX Edge Services Gateway, Edge Distributed Logical Router and their options, hence I am writing this series to explain in detail what I have learnt in the past few days regarding these functions in layman terms and not the marketing jargon I see on the internet regarding VMware NSX.

Part 1 —    NSX Edge Services Gateway

Edge services Gateway has many functions such as L2 Gateway service, L2 Bridging between virtual to physical networks, DHCP, NAT etc.

It is very easy to create Logical switches in the NSX option using vCenter server web client

The hard part comes when you have multiple networks (with subnets) you want to activate on the edge services gateway so that they communicate to each other and to the external uplink on the edge services gateway.

Here is how I did it,

First, I created two Logical switches

• App-LG
• Web-LG

 

I have an L2 physical network switch for my home lab, so I am sure I can’t do L3 routing, in this instance I am going to show you how to create an Edge Services gateway with the proper interfaces to have multiple subnets communicating between them on a VM connected to one of these logical switches.

First, we deploy an Edge services gateway using the default options and the interfaces as shown below:

 

Here are the interfaces which I have configured on the gateway

In the above picture, I created one vNIC as an Uplink (I named it as External) and the IP address I gave that interface as 192.168.0.79/24 (192.168.0.0/24) is my LAN subnet in my home

Then I created two Internal interfaces (I named one as Internal) with interface IP addresses as 172.168.10.2/24 and 172.168.11.2/24 where the IP addresses 172.168.10.2 and 172.168.11.2 act as IP default gateways to the VMs attached to logical gateways App-LG and Web-LG which are connected to the two internal interfaces

Also, I configured the Default gateway in the Edge Services Gateway configuration while deploying as shown:

Now, that we have configured the L2 logical networks on the Edge Services Gateway with the interfaces, let us go to the VMs and see how the communication goes on through the logical networks

We have a test VM called Win7 connected to App-LG (which has an interface IP address as 172.168.10.2) hence the default gateway of this VM will be 172.168.10.2

Here we see the communication using ping to all the interfaces ip addresses both internal and external

In the above picture, you can see that we are able to ping the three interfaces (192.168.0.79, 172.168.10.2 and 172.168.11.2) even though the VM gateway is 172.168.10.2 since its logical gateway is App-LG.

Also, note that we weren’t able to ping my default gateway 192.168.0.1 since there is no interface or routing to 192.168.0.1 in the edge services gateway. We will cover this under routing and NSX Distributed Logical Router part next.

By this, I am concluding this part as I wanted to show you how logical networks can be used with VMS and how their networks can route between the different subnets using Edge services gateway. This is for the East-West traffic between VMS.