The Distributed Logical Router (DLR) in the VMware NSX platform provides an optimized and scalable way of handling East – West traffic within a data center. East – West traffic is the communication between workloads residing within the same data center, which is only increasing in modern data centers. In order to route between segments, traffic must be forwarded to a routing device, rather than directly to its destination. This non-optimal traffic flow is generally referred to as “hair pinning”.

The DLR component of the NSX platform prevents the “hair-pinning” by introducing an East – West routing element within the hypervisor kernel. Each host has a routing kernel module can perform routing between the segments its hosted virtual machines are connected to. The DLR is capable of advertising those connected networks to other routing devices by way of the OSPF and BGP dynamic routing protocols

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Not all virtual networks are going to be connected to the physical world in the same way; some VXLAN logical switches may need to be directly layer 2 adjacent to an existing VLAN backed network, or need to reach a gateway or service interface that resides on a physically defined VLAN. These are some reasons VLAN to VXLAN bridge(s) may need to be implemented within VMware NSX. This is most common in the case of a migration effort to, or if a layer 2 domain containing workloads attached to both VXLAN and VLAN backed networks required.

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The VMware NSX Distributed Firewall is unique in the market for its ability to operate at the vNIC level, in kernel in the hypervisor – giving you control you’ve never had before.

Rating: 5/5

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