Management Plane

NSX Manager

-        As many vCenter you have, need to deploy that number of NSX Manager.

-        Provides management capabilities

-        Associates NSX with vCenter Server

-        Gives an User Interface to manage and configure NSX environment

Control Plane

NSX Controller

-        Embedded in NSX Manager

-        Deploy from NSX Manager

-        Minimum and Maximum 3 NSX Controller per NSX Manager

-        It helps us in routing and switching

-        It maintains 4 different tables.

• 3 table related to switching
• 1 table related to routing

-        3 tables it maintains related to switching is;

• MAC table
• ARP table
• VTEP table

When do we need NSX Controller?

Underlay network devices that you have, are they supporting multicast protocol?

1^st Factor - TOR, Spine, and Physical router, does they support multicasting. If not, then you need NSX Controller.

2^nd Factor - Is the underlay topology support multicast or not? If not, then NSX controller is required.

3^rd Factor – Do you want to use Distributed Logical Router (DLR)? If yes, then you need NSX controller.

4^th Factor - If you want to define Software defined L2 bridging, then you need NSX controller.

If your physical topology in underlay network, if all devices does support multicast IP address to do one to many communications, they you may NOT require NSX controller.

As a best practice, we should always deploy NSX Controller.