During this week’s SDDC workshop in Austin, one of the attendee asked this question to my friend.

What considerations are there for using a separate NSX Edge cluster? When you would, when you wouldn’t want to use a separate cluster.

I know many of you have the same query and this is a repetitive ask from many customers.

These are the considerations that we take, however there is nothing to mandate.

• NSX Manager and NSX Controller cluster should reside on a Management Cluster where other management components also sits, such as, CMP components, monitoring and syslog components etc.
• This management cluster is typically managed through a separate vCenter Server. So NSX Manager sits on Management Cluster, which is managed by the Management vCenter but it registers to the compute vCenter Server.
• The NSX reference design recommends grouping ESXi hosts used for computing in separate clusters striped across dedicated racks. The edge and management clusters can instead be combined in a single rack or dedicated racks depending on the scale of the design (no mandate). The compute, management and edge clusters are laid out based on the purpose they serve.

So you see its a recommendation to separate out the clusters based on their purpose they serve, but its not mandatory to put it across. The different purpose of the clusters has been illustrated in the following figure.

Point to be noted:

• For small environments there is no need for management and edge clusters.
• For medium environnements, management and edge clusters might be combined.
• For large environments, there is absolutely a need to separate out the cluster based on their purpose otherwise managing VM sprawl in a single vCenter will be nightmare for vSphere/Network Admin.

Now let me show you an actual design that does not count for separate Edge Cluster and we counted that as constraint.

Constraint: 

Design Decision: