vCloud Director 9.0, released last week has a bunch of new enhancements and a lot of those are focused around it’s integration with NSX. Tom Fojta has a what’s new page on the go with a lot of the new features being explained. One of his first posts just after the GA was around the new feature of being able to manually create VXLAN backed Network Pools.
VXLAN Network Pool is recommended to be used as it scales the best. Until version 9, vCloud Director would create new VXLAN Network Pool automatically for each Provider VDC backed by NSX Transport Zone (again created automatically) scoped to cluster that belong to the particular Provider VDC. This would create multiple VXLAN network pools and potentially confusion which to use for a particular Org VDC.
In vCloud Director 9.0 we now have the option of creating a VXLAN backed network pool manually instead of one being created at the time of a setting up a Provider vDC. In many of my environments for one reason or another the automatic creation of VXLAN network pool together with NSX would fail. In fact my current NextedESXi SliemaLabs vCD instance shows the following error:
There is a similar but less serious error that can be fixed by changing the replication mode from within the NSX Web Client as detailed here by Luca, however like my lab I’ve know a few people to run into the more serious error as shown above. You can’t delete the pool and a repair operation will continue to error out. Now in vCD 9.0 we can create a new VXLAN Network Pool form the Transport Zones created in NSX.
Once that’s been done you will have the newly created VXLAN Network Pool that’s truly more global and tied to best practice for NSX Transport Zones and one that can be used with the desired replication mode. The old one will remain, but you can now configure Org vDCs to consume the VXLAN backed network pool over the traditional VLAN backed pool.
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