Network Native

NSX-T is a vast product. On this occasion I want to take a crack at explaining NSX-T host preparation in a visually comprehensible manner. Host prep is the process where NSX-T manager will connect with your ESXi hosts and install VIBS, or VMware proprietary software packages (drivers). These vibs allow your hypervisor to participate in overlay networking, distributed firewall and a slew of other NSX-T features. After the NSX manager is installed and you have registered it with vCenter Server, host preparation is the next step. Not mentioned here are the steps to prepare a KVM host. Below: NSX-T U.I. showing successful registration with vCenter For this blog post, I'm going to use a nested ESXi host in my home lab. It has 3 vNic which are perceived as vmnics by the nested ESXi instance: Through the NSX-T UI, the unprepared ESXi host look like this: At this point, you could choose to apply a transport node profile, but to keep it simple we're not going to do that. Select the host