In this walk-through we will be deploying a logical router and configuring routing between (2) logical networks that we created in an earlier post. Logical routers consist of two components. A virtual appliance that is deployed into your vSphere environment. In the MoaC lab all routers are deployed to our management cluster and the vSphere Kernel module. Remember the host preparations we performed as part of the NSX installation? That was installing the NSX kernel modules.
The NSX Logical Routers Perform East-West (VM-VM) routing as well and North-South Routing. The East-West routing performed by the Logical Routers afford you some extra efficiencies by allowing VM-VM communications across different subnets to happen at the vSphere Kernel when those vm’s reside on the same host. You can also gain efficiencies when communicating between vm’s on different hosts as well. Traffic for the communications will traverse host to host instead of needing to go out to a physical router on the network and then to the other vm. In the post you will witness this as we place a virtual machine on each of the logical switches we created and the Logical Router performs routing between the two networks right in the hosts kernel. Although this specific post focuses on the East-West routing within the Logical Router we will be covering the North-South routing configuration in another post.