NSX-T 2.0 – Deploying NSX Manager

NSX-T has been decoupled from vCenter and is availabe for multiple platforms and since lots of things are happening around SDN, their integration with Micro Services running on containers and kubernetes , so it is right to start getting familiar with NSX-T before customer start adopting it.

So first step towards learning NSX-T is to read through official documentation and parallelly start deploying NSX-T 2.0 components…here is the deployment flow that i will follow:

Install NSX Manager.
Install NSX Controllers.
Join NSX Controllers with the management plane.
Initialize the control cluster to create a master controller.
Join NSX Controllers into a control cluster. NSX Manager installs NSX-T modules after the hypervisor hosts are added.
Join hypervisor hosts with the management plane. This causes the host to send its host certificate to the management plane.
Install NSX Edges.
Join NSX Edges with the management plane.
Create transport zones and transport nodes.

So let’s move towards our first step, deploy NSX Manager….

Here is the System Requirements for NSX-T Manager :
NSX-T has specific requirements regarding hardware resources and software versions.

for My Lab I am going to use Nested ESXi6.5.

1 – First login to ESXi using HTML5 Client and run the New Virtual Machine wizard and select “Deploy a virtual machine from an OVF or OVA file”

Enter the name for the NSX-T Manager appliance (nsxtm.avnlab.com) and choose NSX-T Manager appliance OVA (nsx-unified-appliance-2.0.0.0.0.6522097)

Select your storage

Choose your network , Disk type

Enter various password for “Root User” , “admin User” and “audit User” , we need to setup a complex password , else it will ask to enter new password post deployment.

NOTE – NSX-T core services on the appliance will not start until a password with sufficient complexity is set.

Password complexity requirement:

At least eight characters
At least one lower-case letter
At least one upper-case letter
At least one digit
At least one special character
At least five different characters
No dictionary words
No palindromes

in the same window Enter the “Hostname” , Rolename will be “nsx-manager” don’t change it.

Enter DNS and NTP server details , enable SSH and root SSH login ( if you required)

and click finish

it will take some time and once ova import completes , you are done.

Login with IP address that we specified in the installation and Here is your first NSX-T login screen…login with user name “admin” and password that we specified in above steps.