Deploying GigaVUE Cloud Suite on VMware vCenter in a multi-tier DC Environment (5.12)

Introduction

Large enterprises have distributed NOC/SOC teams to manage their assets regionally. When securing assets and services, lack of visibility has been a fundamental problem especially when the asset management is migrated to virtual workloads. The challenge further exacerbates since the security and monitoring tools cannot get a whiff of the traffic between the virtual workloads that may reside on the same host. In such scenarios, Gigamon CloudSuite can be deployed to provide pervasive visibility. Gigamon Cloud Suite also helps in optimizing the traffic before monitoring for better performance of tools (lesser computing cycles) and only fewer tools will be needed. The following Gigamon Validated Design (GVD) illustrates deploying one such Gigamon Cloud Suite solution on VMware vCenter managing a multi-tier DC environment.

Design Overview

This GVD illustrates the deployment of Gigamon CloudSuite in hub and spoke DC locations. All tools discussed in this GVD are deployed as virtual instances on the same vCenter. However, the tools can also act as dedicated hardware appliances.

  • Hub DC: Incoming traffic (IPv4) should be optimized by removing the duplicate packets. All traffic should be forwarded to a Network Detection and Response (NDR) tool and only the web traffic should be forwarded to Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool.
  • Spoke DC: Incoming traffic (IPv4) should be optimized by removing the duplicate packets and forwarded to a local NDR tool.

To monitor the traffic in such environments, a vCenter can be deployed. vCenter can be deployed in three scenarios as given below: 

  1. A single vCenter could manage both Hub and Spoke DCs with common administrative account.
  2. A single vCenter could manage both Hub and Spoke DCs with different administrative account each.
  3. Each of the locations can have a dedicated vCenter.

For scenarios 2 and 3, please refer to the GigaVUE Cloud Suite for VMware Configuration Guide. This document covers only deployment of the first scenario.

To learn more about this solution, read complete details on the Gigamon Community: Deploying GigaVUE Cloud Suite on VMware vCenter in a multi-tier DC Environment 5.12.