NSX Edge

The vast majority of VMware Homelabs is still Intel-based today but I have been seeing a slow rise of AMD-based kits being adopted, especially with AMD's desktop line of CPUs known as Ryzen. One of the considerations on whether you could use an AMD processor was whether you were planning to deploy NSX-T and in earlier releases, only Intel was supported as the NSX-T Edge required support for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and this was only supported with Intel-based processors.

With the latest NSX-T 3.0 release, AMD-based processors are now supported and per the release notes, the following CPUs can be used:

AMD EPYC 7xx1 Series (Naples)
AMD EPYC 3000 Embedded Family and newer
AMD EPYC 7xx2 Series (Rome)

You will notice that only AMD's server line of CPUs known as EPYC are currently supported, which makes sense for running Production workloads. If you attempt to deploy an NSX-T Edge Node running on a non-EPYC platform, you will get an error message stating the CPU is not supported and I figured this was probably due to the lack of DPDK support in the consumer CPUs.

Yesterday, in our internal "Homelab" Slack channel, I came across an interesting tidbit from Andrea Spagnolo, a Sr. Field Engineer in our Cloud Native Business Unit who shared a pretty neat trick on how to get latest NSX-T 3.0 release to work with a Ryzen-based CPU.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. The behaviors described here can change in the future

First off, I want to thank Andrea for sharing but also credit to Beniamino Guarnaschelli and his blog post here which actually gave Andrea the idea to take a closer look as he was trying to get this setup in his own personal homelab.

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After publishing my vSphere 7 with Kubernetes automation lab deployment script, I was looking at my NSX-T Edge code which leverages the vSphere VM Keystroke API to automate the joining of the the NSX-T Edge to the NSX-T Management Plane. This technique is used to avoid the need for SSH access to both NSX-T Edge and Manager which is the official VMware method as outlined in the documentation for configuring the Edge.

This is certainly unfortunate as most customers normally disable SSH by default and only enable it for troubleshooting/debugging purposes. As far as I know, there are no remote NSX-T APIs for configuring an NSX-T Edge that has been deployed outside of NSX-T Manager, which has its own implications.

I recently had a chance to revisit some research I had made a note of when I had first started working with NSX-T. While inspecting the NSX-T Edge OVA, I found several OVF properties that begin with mp which per the description was referring to the NSX-T Manager. At the time, I was not able to figure out which the required combination of keys and values. Taking a closer look and poking around the appliance and logs, I was able to finally figure out the correct combination which turned out to be easy, once you knew what it was expecting.

To help demonstrate this functionality, I have created a basic PowerCLI script edge-auto-join-nsxt-management-plane.ps1 which uses information from your already deployed NSX-T Manager to automatically deploy the desired number of NSX-T Edge(s) which will automatically join the NSX-T Management Plane upon initial setup.

The way this works is that the following four OVF properties must be filled as part of the NSX-T Edge deployment: