Maintaining Pervasive Visibility During vSphere to NSX-T Migration with VLAN Segments (6.0)

Introduction

Enterprise datacenters are getting transformed as companies shift towards Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) and hyper-converged infrastructure. In particular, enterprises are transitioning from traditional datacenter or VMware vSphere environment to VMWare NSX-T data center. Such migrations face many challenges, such as compatibility with other OEM products and solutions, parallel implementation across different platforms, additional licensing offsets, etc. 

In this GVD, we will be discussing the scenario where Gigamon visibility is required on both the vCenter and the NSX-T layers of the environment during the migration of vSphere to NSX-T. In this case, the Gigamon visibility solution deployed on NSX-T will co-exist with the vCenter visibility solution. This Gigamon Cloud suite solution for NSX-T supports various permissible deployment models including managing workloads on VLAN-backed and overlay NSX segments, host and cluster-based deployments, NSX-T manager and GigaVUE-FM led orchestration. Both the NSX-T and the vSphere workloads in vCenter can be monitored via Gigamon Cloud suite for VMware, and all the visibility solutions are managed by the same Fabric Manager thus enabling seamless migration with no additional license hassles.

Refer to Gigamon Validated Designs section of Gigamon community documentations for more such designs. Please check with your Gigamon Sales contact or Gigamon Support for more information regarding the support for the cloud/virtualization platform that you are considering.

Design Overview

The design topology illustrates the deployment of Gigamon Cloud Suite in a VMware vCenter and NSX-T environment to monitor workloads spread across both the platforms. The workloads being monitored are deployed on VDS for vCenter and on VLAN-backed segment for NSX-T.

In this GVD, traffic is acquired from VMware vCenter and NSX-T and optimized for forwarding to an IDS. For vCenter, it is a standard deployment with VDS switch being the target realm for monitoring, and for NSX-T, the below deployment options are the chosen:

  • The fabric manager is used as the image server
  • The deployment is orchestrated using GigaVUE-FM
  • Cluster-based deployment is chosen

To learn more about this solution, read complete details on the Gigamon Community: Maintaining pervasive visibility during vSphere to NSX-T migration with VLAN Segments (6.0)