Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

When integrating vCAC with NSX you will need to configure reservations for use with NSX. Depending on your configuration you may need one or more reservations. One reservation for your provisioned workloads, and one reservation for the provisioned NSX Edge router.

You have the option of provisioning the Edge Router to the same reservation as the Multi-Machine blueprint, or you can specify a separate reservation for the Edge Router. In the MoaC lab I will be using a separate reservation for the Edge Router because all routers are to be deployed in the Management Cluster and all workloads in the Services Cluster.

Before we create the reservations we are going to create a Reservation Policy. Reservation Policies are basically a tag that allows you to target reservations that are assigned with targeted Reservation Policy.

Creating a Reservation Policy

Go to Infrastructure –> Reservations –> Reservation Policies Select New Reservation Policy Give the Policy a Name and click the green check. That’s it. Like I said it’s just a tag.

Create a Reservation Policy to use with an Edge Gateway Reservation.

Creating a Reservation for the Edge Gateway Routers

Navigate to Infrastructure –> Reservations –> Reservations and select New Reservation –> Virtual –> vSphere(vCenter). When the New Reservation Dialog opens choose a Compute Resource, assign a Name, Tenant, Business Group, The Reservation Policy you created, and a Priority, then click on the Resources Tab. On the Resources Tab set the amount of memory for the reservation, select a datastore, the amount of space and priority on the datastore, and optionally a vCenter Resource pool and then select the Network tab. This is where we really make this a reservation for NSX Edge Routers. The first thing we need to do is select the network for the Edge Routers uplink interface. This is the Logical Switch that is connected to an already deployed to a routed gateway. This would match a network for which we created an External Network Profile. Once you have selected the appropriate network as assigned the External Network Profile then you need to select the appropriate Transport Zone. Make sure this is the transport zone associated with the Logical Switch that you have selected as your network.Next optionally select a security group to apply the appropriate security policies for machine placed on to this reservation. Finally select the up-stream routed gateway that will the next-hop router for the deployed NSX Edge Gateway. Click OK when you are finished. This completes teh NSX Edge Reservation, however we still need to create a reservation for the provisioned virtual machines.

Create Virtual Machine Reservation for NSX

Navigate to Infrastructure –> Reservations –> Reservations and select New Reservation –> Virtual –> vSphere(vCenter). You will create with reservation much like the one that we created above however you will assign the Memory and Datastores you would like to use. You have two choices for the networking. The first is you can configure it exactly like we did the NSX Edge Reservation. I tend to configure it to match the NSX Edge reservation so if I ever needed to I could deploy the edge to the reservation. Option 2 is you simply check off any network because in the end it will not be assigned or used and then you choose the appropriate Transport Zone. If you don’t anticipate ever sending an NSX Edge to this reservation then you don’t need to do anything else.

I won’t be going into the step by step for creating this reservation the above step by step for the NSX Edge is just about the same as what you will do for this reservation with the information I provided above.

That completes the creation of the reservation needed by NSX. You of course may want more reservations for other uses and you can create them in the same way we just created these with the relevant info for the other networks etc.