Cloud Foundation requires seven networks and at least one connection to a customer network (for external access to your Cloud Foundation stack). In the following example, a private IP address range is used for all connectivity within the management stack. There is also an IP network that connects back to an external network.
Each of these networks is propagated to the Cloud Foundation stack using tagged VLANs. Using tagged VLANs enables mapping of port groups to VLANs, allowing access to resources as needed. All of these networks are routable to and from each other. The routing task is executed at some layer above the access level switched fabric that is deployed here.
The networks required to deploy Cloud Foundation are listed in the following table:
Network | Description |
Management | Dedicated to communication between all the deployed resources and services. When the SDDC Manager Utility needs to communicate to any other service or resource, it uses the management network. |
vSAN | Used to communicate and synchronize vSAN storage traffic across multiple hosts to ensure data integrity and resiliency. |
vMotion | Used to quickly redistribute virtual machine state and or storage between hosts. |
Host Overlay | The host overlay network is used by NSX-T for control plane communication between the hosts of the Cloud Foundation cluster. |
Uplinks (two) | The uplink networks are used by NSX-T for data traffic into and out of the cluster. |
Edge Overlay | This network is used by the Edge Nodes in an NSX-T environment to allow the transport nodes to access the capabilities of NSX-T. |