Data Center Group

VMware Cloud Director supports data center group networking backed by NSX-T Data Center. To create a network across multiple organization VDCs, you first group the VDCs, then create a group network that is shared across them. Data center group networks backed by NSX-T Data Center provide level-2 network sharing, single active egress point configuration and distributed firewall (DFW) rules that are applied across a data center group.

Creating data center group

A data center group acts as a cross-VDC router that provides centralized networking administration, egress point configuration, and east-west traffic between all networks within the group. A data center group can contain between one and 16 VDCs that you configure to share an active egress point.

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Example: Creating data center group with 2 DC

Add egress point(edge) in data center group

To route traffic in and out of a data center group network to an external network, you must configure an NSX-T Data Center edge gateway to be the egress point for a data center group. When you configure an edge gateway to be the egress point for a data center group, you increase its scope to the data center group. The edge gateway then becomes shared across all data centers that participate in the group. All routed networks that are attached to the edge gateway are attached to the data center group and scoped to it.

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Example: Adding edge in data center group

If a VDC is a member of the data center group and if no workloads are attached to any of the routed networks that are not part of the targeted scope, you can remove an edge gateway from a data center group and scope it to a single VDC.

You can add an edge gateway to an isolated data center group network and convert it to a routed data center network. You can also remove the connection to an edge gateway from a data center group network, converting the routed network to an isolated data center group network.

Data center group network (Shared networks)

After you create and configure a data center group, you can create and manage data center group networks spanning the participating VDCs. You can use routed, isolated, and imported organization data center group networks backed by NSX-T Data Center. A data center group network can only be scoped to a single data center group. You can increase the scope of an existing network from an organization VDC to a data center group. You can add all types of networks to a data center group.