How to Deploy a VRF Lite Gateway in VMware NSX-T 3.2

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A virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) gateway makes it possible for multiple instances of a routing table to exist within the same gateway at the same time. VRFs are the layer 3 equivalent of a VLAN. A VRF gateway must be linked to a tier-0 gateway. From the tier-0 gateway, the VRF gateway inherits the HA mode, Edge cluster, internal transit subnet, T0-T1 transit subnets, and BGP routing configuration.

If you are using NSX Federation, you can use the Global Manager to create a VRF gateway on a tier-0 gateway if the tier-0 spans only one location. VRF gateway is not supported on stretched tier-0 gateways in NSX Federation. EVPN is not supported in NSX Federation.

Note that even though a VRF gateway has an HA mode, it does not have a mechanism to respond to a communication failure that is independent of the tier-0 gateway’s mechanism. If a VRF gateway loses connectivity to a neighbor but the criteria for the tier-0 gateway to fail over are not met, the VRF gateway will not fail over. The only time a VRF gateway will fail over is when the tier-0 gateway does a failover.

How to Deploy a VRF Lite GW

First let us create an uplink trunk segment that is connected to the uplink interfaces of each VRF GW

Provide a name

Select your VLAN TZ

Also put in the VLANs you already setup

Select VRF

Provide a name

Select a T0 GW to connect to

Save

Yes

Set

Add interface

Provide a name, IP, and connect to the pre-created segment

Also select an edge node and provide the VLAN ID

Set BGP neighbors

Add BGP neighbor

Enter I address

Remote AS number

Source Address

Save

Close

Set

Add

Now you can create T1 GW and segments and use the VRF GW like you would a traditional T0 GW

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