Currently, I am working on some overall design content for Edge Clusters inside of VMware vCloud Director 9.7. However, I wanted to share a post on providing a step by step guide on establishing an Edge Cluster inside of vCD. I will much more to share on our corporate blog shortly, but this should start some thoughtful discussions.
Quick Intro to Edge Clusters
So what’s the deal with Edge Clusters? Edge Clusters now allow a provider to discrete control of tenant Edge placement. Previously, this was rather limited and only controlled at the Provider Virtual Data Center (pVDC) layer. With Edge Clusters, we now can establish this on a per-oVDC basis. In essence, the three main value points of Edge Clusters:
- Consumption of dedicated Edge Clusters for North/South traffic – optimized traffic flow while minimizing the span of Layer 2 broadcast traffic.
- Provide a higher level of availability to Edge nodes that can distinctly fail between two clusters.
- Ability to balance organization Edge services between multiple Edge Clusters – I do not have to use the “same” Primary and Secondary Edge Cluster for every org VDC. This can be configured on a per orgVDC basis.
Below is a overall high level design of Edge Clusters from a physical and logical layer –
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