Parallel to DLR using VXLAN or VLANs with Avi Vantage for East-West Load Balancing
Note: Starting with Avi Vantage 20.1.3, support for NSX-V full access is deprecated, and the support for NSX-V full access will be removed in the upcoming releases. It is recommended to:
- Migrate to Avi’s NSX-T integration
- In case NSX-V support is still required, it is recommended to configure Avi with a no-orchestrator cloud.
In this topology the Avi SE is installed parallel to DLR. Physically, the Avi SE gets deployed on the ESXi compute rack. The exact ESXi hosts or cluster on which the SE needs to be placed can be configured in SE group properties on Avi Vantage. This topology can work with both VLAN (layer 2) and VXLAN (layer 3 routed overlay) networks.
Logical and Physical View
Logically, Avi SE is installed parallel to DLR. The SEs may be deployed in elastic HA (active/active or N+M buffer) or legacy HA (active/standby) mode. The SE connects to the Web-tier-01 network for front-end and App-tier-01 network for back-end. Traffic from web server is SNATed by the SE. Default gateway for different servers (web, application and DB) is DLR.
Following the recommended design (refer to VMware® NSX for vSphere Network Virtualization Design Guide ver 3.0), the recommendation is to configure the SE group properties to physically deploy the SEs in the compute racks, where the web-tier and app-tier networks (VXLANS or VLANS) are available.
Traffic Flows
East-West Traffic Flow
Logical traffic flows are:
- Web server → Avi SE
- Avi SE → app server
Physical traffic flows are:
- Web VM → ESXi kernel hosting the Web VM → ESXi kernel hosting the SE
- ESXi kernel hosting the SE → SE VM → ESXi kernel hosting the app VM
- ESXi hosting the app VM → the app VM
VIP requirements
- App-VIP requires SNAT