For the last section of this guide, we will once again go to the top left Hamburger Menu and select Infrastructure. The default landing page for the Infrastructure section shows the dashboard for Service Engines (SE). The SE dashboard display is similar to the one for virtual services (Applications > Dashboard), but shows only SEs.

All Service Engines across all clouds are shown. For each SE, the color indicates its health, with a numeric health score also shown below the name of each SE. Hovering the mouse over the SE icon shows the SE health score breakdown. Clicking the SE name will jump to that SE’s page.

Next, we will click on Clouds from the top horizontal menu. Clouds are containers for the environment that Vantage is installed or operating within. During initial setup of Vantage, a default cloud, named “Default-Cloud”, is created. This is where the first Controller is deployed, into Default-Cloud. Additional clouds may be added, containing SEs and Virtual Services.

Our Horizon environment is built with the NSX-T Cloud. Currently we cannot view the configuration as part of this demo as we have Read-Only privileges. This option will be available shortly however.

The next item on our list is Service Engine on the top horizontal menu. Avi Service Engines handle all of the data plane operations within Vantage. SEs host the virtual services and require either direct or routable access to all client and server networks a virtual service touches. You will see a blank screen as our Service Engines are associated with the NSX-T Cloud. Select the TestDrive-MGMT-NSX-T from the dropdown menu and we can now see the SEs deployed within the Cloud. We can also expand using the plus sign on each SE to see which Virtual Services are deployed. In the below example we are looking at the DNS listener Service Engine.

We can then click on the Service Engine name and this will bring up logs and analytics for the specific SE. Over here, we can look at metrics such as throughput, CPU usage, Memory Usage etc. for each SE.

Now click on Service Engine Group and select TestDrive-MGMT-NSX-T from the dropdown. SEs are always grouped within the context of a SE group, which provides settings for high availability, scalability, and potentially resource isolation for tenants. Service Engine Groups have been configured as per best practices. We have a SE group each for the Internal Segment, the DMZ Segment and for the GSLB DNS Listener. We can also expand these and see which Virtual Services are applied in each group.

We will now move on to the Networks Tab on the top horizontal menu. The networks tab shows us the networks configured on the controller which are available to the Service Engines. These networks were discovered as part of the NSX-T Cloud Connector setup process. Additionally you can see the static range assigned to each network. This static range is used for IP addressing for Service Engine data NICs and also for VS addressing if IPAM is configured.

The final piece in our guide is VRF Context. The VRF Context tab shows us the static routes configured for each VRF. Within NSX-T cloud connector each T1 sits in its own VRF. We have one T1 for the internal segment and another for the DMZ.

Static routes allow administrators to determine the next hop path for routed traffic. Static routes may be defined for an IP subnet or a specific IP address, determined by the subnet mask defined.

A static route may also be set as the default gateway. Default gateways may also be defined within the settings of an SE, which will override the global static routes, and will be specific to the modified SE. If DHCP is not used and a default gateway needs to be defined, then it is recommended to define the gateway within the Static Routes tab, which will be applicable to all SEs.

For more information on Infrastructure, please refer to the following documentation.