NSX-T Federation with mixed major versions.

[MC1903]

Hello,

I have a VCF 4.5 to 5.2 hardware platform refresh coming up soon.

For legacy reasons, we are considering deploying a fresh SDDC Manager, Management & Workload Domains/Clusters. Effectively a clean greenfield VCF 5.2 build out.

I need a way to make my existing NSX-T 3.2 Segments available in the new NSX-T 4.2 Clusters; so I can just xvMotion migrate my VM's across clusters without any need to re-IP.

I was wondering if I could use NSX-T Federation with mixed major versions to allow me to do this migration?

I guess mixed major versions are supported during a Federated NSX-T upgrade, but can I deploy Federation fresh across mixed major versions?

Is there an NSX-T feature interop matrix anywhere?

Any thoughts, pointers or advice is welcomed.

Cheers

M

[Pawel Piotrowski]

Hi Marin,

From the official support perspective all participants have to be in the same version - take a look here

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/nsx/nsxt-dc/3-2/installation-guide/getting-started-with-federation/federation-requirements.html

"The Global Manager and Local Manager appliances must all have NSX 3.1.0 or later installed. All appliances in an NSX Federation environment must have the same version installed."

However, apart from Federation there are other options to stretch the network for migration - using L2 Bridging, L2VPN or HCX - did you consider these?

[MC1903]

Thanks Pawel,

I missed that line in the requirements :-)

The L2 'stretch' isn't the problem I was considering, as both platforms are in the same DC; I just didn't want to recreate 100's of segments.

The current VCF 4.5 hardware is supported with VCF 5.2, so we could upgrade it and then configure NSX-T Federation for the migration.

Cheers

M