When considering a network extension into VMware Cloud on AWS for the purpose of migration activities we have two options to us, this also includes HA options for each. I have written about each of these previously. We have HCX Network Extension High Availability and NSX Autonomous Edge HA. It’s got me thinking, for those applications that are heavily reliant on network extensions in the migration process, what provides the best failover at HA? So I thought I would carry out a quick test.
Starting with the NSX Autonomous Edge and building up on previous post I have configured an extended network. We can see here the primary node within the NSX Edges up, connected and HA enabled.
Here is the secondary node summary page affirming the HA status.
For the purpose of this test I have also configured a VM within the SDDC, connected to the extended network to validate the connectivity and failover of the appliances, this was configured with 172.16.2.101 as it’s IP.
Next step, I wanted to simulate a failure of the active NSX Edge node, bring on the not so graceful shutdown.
As we can see here from the continuous ping that I had running to the VM connected to the extended network. This dropped a total of 8 ping requests.
Now onto the HCX test, again building on the previous posts HCX was already in place and configured and I had created a HA group for the NE appliances as shown below.
As with the NSX Edge approach, I identified the active node, in this case was NE-2 and initiate a not so graceful shutdown to simulate a failure of the node.
As we can see from the continuous ping that was running in the background, the failover was somewhat quicker in this instance than the NSX Edge failover, only dropping 2 ping requests in this scenario.
While HCX does offer the better HA capabilities, there are still scenarios where the NSX Autonomous Edge would be used in place of the HCX NE capability. HCX for example requires the use of vSphere Distributed Switches on-prem (assuming no NSX at source) where as NSX Autonomous Edge’s can extend networks configured on vSphere Standard Switches.
