VMware NSX Components & Architecture Part – 2 – –Virtualize & Automate

VMware NSX Components & Architecture

VMware NSX Components – In this blog post we would explore the various components that make up NSX.

There are many components which make up the NSX virtual network, they can be described as components which work in different plane, but all of these components work in conjunction with each other.

There are three different planes which make up the NSX architecture, they are sorted from the highest to lowest the

Management Plane
Control Plane
Data Plane

Management Plane :-

This plane constitutes of two components which are the NSX manager and the registered vCenter server, also note this is a 1-1 relationship, if you have multiple vcenter server then you need to have multiple NSX managers.

There is also a “Message bus agent” which exists in this plane which helps to carry the communication in between the three planes, when ever you perform any activity on the NSX Manager the information on what needs to be performed is carried by the Message bus agent to the other two planes.

Control Plane :-

In the control plane we have the controller cluster, which basically consists of 3 VM’s, which use the Paxos algorithm used internally and it usually works the best when we have odd number of vms.

The NSX controller cluster is basically the brain, which basically goes ahead and scans and learns the network information and saved them in MAC, ARP tables, it just learns how the switch or the router does.

The other component we have at the control plane is the “NSX Logical Router Control VM”, it negotiates the routing protocols, it discovers the networks which are not directly connected to it, they also provide the required information to build the tables in the NSX controller cluster

Another component which is not highlighted in the figure is a “User World agent” which acts as a component to connect both the Management plane ( NSX Manager ) and the Data plane.

Data Plane :-

The Data plane consists of two components which make up the NSX switch and those two components are the vDS (Distributed switch) and the Host clusters which have the Hypervisor kernel modules installed in them.

The Hypervisor Kernel modules consists of the VXLan (Virtual Extensible LAN ) which allows us to extent the network, another one is the Distributed Logical Router (DLR) and the Distributed Firewall.

We also have the concept of NSX Edge which allows us to connect into and out of the Data Plane.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post on the various VMware NSX Components and found the information useful.