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Single Node VMware Avi Load Balancer with VCF 9.0 & VCF 9.1

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 continues to support one of the most popular and powerful load balancer, VMware Avi Load Balancer. When you deploy a new VMware Avi Load Balancer within a given VCF Domain, by default SDDC Manager will deploy three VMware Avi Controllers for high availability purposes.

For lab purposes, you may not need all three VMware Avi Controllers but there was no way to change the system default in earlier releases of VCF. With VCF 9.0, we now have way to deploy just a single VMware Avi Controller, which is fantastic for lab and testing purposes.

UPDATE (07/10/26) - Single node deployment of Avi Load Balancer is now officially supported as of 31.2.1 for small environments and edge sites.

UPDATE (05/27/26) - This workaround is still applicable for VCF 9.1.0, there is variable called $vcf91 which is set to $true which will add an additional property that is required with VCF 9.1 and later deployments.

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Quick Tip - How to deploy NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) with a single Service Engine

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I saw an interesting question today from Robert Kloosterhuis in the private vExpert App Modernization Slack Channel who working with vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) and wanted to know if it was possible to deploy NSX-ALB with just a single Service Engine (SE)?

The default behavior of NSX-ALB is to deploy two SE for availability purpose but for testing and/or homelab usage, it could certainly help with resources and time to spin up an environment using NSX-ALB. I was also curious if this was possible and reached out to NSX-ALB Engineering team and within a few minutes, I got a response that not only was this possible to do but pretty easy to configure.

To modify this default behavior, we need to update the Service Engine group prior to SE VMs being deployed. To do so, login to NSX-ALB UI and under Infrastructure->Service Engine Group and then click on the Advanced tab and change the default Buffer Service Engines value of 1 to 0 which will will have NSX-ALB deploy just a single SE VM rather than the default two.


To confirm that our NSX-ALB have been configured correctly, I have enabled vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-ALB and as you can see from the screenshot below, only a single SE VM has been deployed rather than the default behavior of two SE.

Configuring NSX Advanced Load Balancer with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS

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One of the exciting new features of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) 1.3 release is the support for NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) as a Layer-4 load balancer solution for your Kubernetes (K8s) based workloads. Most recently, there were a couple of customer inquiries asking whether TKG 1.3 and NSX ALB is supported on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and the answer is yes!


I suspect part of the reason on why this question came up is that it may have been difficult to find a clear support stance for this configuration and although there is some documentation in the AVI Portal for installing NSX ALB on VMConAWS, it certainly was not easy to find. I personally also found the instructions to a be on the lighter side after reading through a few times. Since I already had my TKG Demo Appliance Fling deployed in my VMConAWS SDDC, it was easy enough to un-deploy my existing TKG Management Cluster and set it up with NSX ALB. You can find the detailed instructions below and although the setup of NSX ALB and TKG is similiar to an on-premises vSphere deployment as recently documented by Cormac Hogan, there are still some subtle differences, especially if you are not placing both TKG and NSX ALB systems all on the same single, which you may find in demos 🙂

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