The NSX Manager provides a web-based user interface to manage the VMware NSX-T Data Center environment. In production environments, VMware recommends deploying a cluster of three NSX Manager nodes for high availability.
To deploy the first NSX Manager, perform the following steps:
- Access the vSphere Client.Note: In this deployment example, it is at vCenter.dell.local.
- Select Menu and choose Hosts and Clusters.
- In the left pane, right-click the NSX-DC cluster and click Deploy OVF template.
- On the Select an OVF template page, browse to the NSX-T unified appliance .ova file from the local machine, and click Open.Note: In this deployment, the file is named NSX-T-unified-appliance.
- Click NEXT.
- On the Select a name and folderpage:
- Assign a name for the first NSX Manager appliance VM.Note: In this deployment, it is NSX-Manager01.
- Under Location, select the existing data center and click NEXT.
- Assign a name for the first NSX Manager appliance VM.
- Select a compute resource.Note: In this deployment, the R640_MGMT server is selected.
- Click NEXT.
- Review the details and click NEXT.
- Select the deployment configuration.Note: In this deployment, Medium is used.
- Click NEXT.
- Select the storage.Note: In this deployment, Datastore-0 datastore is selected.
- Click NEXT.
- Under Select networks, select the Management Network, then select IP protocol as IPv4.
- Click NEXT.
- On the Customize templatepage, select the following values for this deployment:
- Enter the Root and Admin password for the NSX-Manager01 VM
- Hostname – NSX-Manager01.dell.local
- Default IPv4 Gateway – 172.16.11.254
- Management Network IPv4 Address – 172.16.11.151
- Management Network Netmask – 255.255.255.0
- DNS Server – 172.16.11.120 and 172.16.11.130
- Domain Search List – dell.local
- NTP server – ntp.dell.local
- Enable SSH – checked (optional)
- Allow root SSH logins– not checked (optional)Note: For this deployment, keep the remaining configurations set to the default settings.
- Click NEXT and then click FINISH.
Verify NSX Manager network connectivity
To verify the NSX Manager network connectivity, perform the following steps:
- In the vSphere Client, open the NSX Manager VM console.
- After the NSX Manager successfully boots, log in to NSX Manager by entering the required credentials as configured above.
- Verify DNS and network connectivity by pinging other hosts with their Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs). The following figure shows that NSX-Manager01 successfully pings ESXi Host-3 and the DNS server IP address.