As of NSX version 4.1.1, NSX Advanced Load Balancer version 22.1.4, and vSphere with Tanzu version 8.0 Update 2 we have the option to leverage the NSX Advanced Load Balancer as the load balancer provider for new vSphere with Tanzu backed by NSX networking deployments.

This deployment option is a very welcome addition knowing that the NSX “native” load balancer is scheduled for deprecation in a future release.

Registering NSX Advanced Load Balancer with NSX

After deployment and the initial configuration of NSX and the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (detailed steps available in the vSphere with Tanzu documentation) we register the NSX Advanced Load Balancer with NSX Manager. This is accomplished with a simple API call:

PUT /policy/api/v1/infra/alb-onboarding-workflow 

The accompanying request body contains the following keys:

{
"owned_by": "LCM",
"cluster_ip": "<nsx-alb-controller-cluster-ip>",
"infra_admin_username" : "username",
"infra_admin_password" : "password",
"dns_servers": ["<dns-servers-ips>"],
"ntp_servers": ["<ntp-servers-ips>"]
}

Bringing this together in a curl one-liner could look something like this:

curl -u admin --location --request PUT 'https://ams-nsxt-lm/policy/api/v1/infra/alb-onboarding-workflow' \
--header 'X-Allow-Overwrite: True' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
"owned_by": "LCM",
"cluster_ip": "10.203.200.15",
"infra_admin_username" : "admin",
"infra_admin_password" : "VMware1!",
"dns_servers": ["10.203.0.5"],
"ntp_servers": ["10.203.0.5"]
}'

More information about this method can be found in the NSX API documentation.

When the registration is done you’ll notice that a shortcut to the NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller UI has been added to the NSX Manager UI. Handy!

But more important, when we enable Tanzu Supervisor and/or deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster under this Supervisor, we see that it is the NSX Advanced Load Balancer that’s hosting the VIP(s) on its Service Engine(s):

Summary

A very short article just to make you aware of this option and how it’s configured. I’m happy to see that customers can now use the NSX Advanced Load Balancer for their new vSphere with Tanzu backed by NSX networking installations.