We began this chapter by preparing our environment and understanding the different limitations of NSX in order to begin its deployment. We then went ahead and deployed NSX Manager using the vSphere web client. Remember that NSX cannot be managed by traditional Windows clients and can only be managed by the vSphere web client. We then had a quick overview of NSX Manager to familiarize ourselves with the management interface functionality. Next we went ahead and configured our NSX Manager with our vCenter server. This allows us to go ahead and start configuring NSX services for our vCenter. We managed our NSX Manager using the vSphere web client and continued to deploy our control plane. Lastly, we prepared our hosts for network virtualization by deploying the data plane that by default enables the distributed firewall service on all ESXi hosts in a cluster.

In the Chapter 4, NSX Functional Services, we will go over the step-by-step deployment and configuration of multiple NSX features and services and configure logical switches, transport zones, and other NSX functions.