NSX-T Federation Vs Multisite

So we’ve all heard of NSX-T and the buzz surrounding Federation, what are the benefits of it and how does it relate to multisite. These are some of the questions I am going to try and answer.

MultiSite

From NSX-T 2.5 VMware introduced Multisite. In essence this is where you can manage multiple sites from one NSX manager node, this supports disaster recovery where one main site is used and the secondary site is used to be failed over to if needed. Active-Active is also supported where all sites are active. These can then be deployed for automatic or manual recovery. There are also a number of requirements to use multisite these can be found here

Federation

In NSX-T 3.0 Federation was released this allows NSX-T deployments to be stretched over multiple sites. The management plane is throughout all sites however managed as a single component. A new concept was Global Managers, you have one GM (two clusters in an active/standby configuration) connected to a number of local managers. In an outage the standby will take over the active role. Objects can now be made globally and can be available throughout every connected site. The relevant global objects are then pushed through to the relevant LM.

What to use when

Whether to use federation or multisite comes down to a number of factors, multisite is a good option for a smaller site. Federation is also not completely available yet this is awaiting the release of NSX-T 3.1.

In the next post we will be exploring some of the other new features of NSX-T.