The release of NSX-T 3.1.1 brings with it, among other things, OSPFv2 routing! This may be a welcome return to many enterpirses who haven’t adopted BGP in the datacentre and allows for a smoother transition from NSX-V, which has always had OSPF support.
Unlike with NSX-V, where routing was used within the virtual domain (between ESGs and DLRs), NSX-T only uses dynamic routing protocols for external P-V connectivity. So OSPF is enabled on T0 Gateways, connecting to the physical world.
Once you have a T0 Gateway deployed, enabling OSPF is now just a few clicks away…
Here’s the logical topology that will be configured in the rest of this post:
Configuring OSPF
1. Assign each interface for each VLAN to the relevant Edge Node:
2. Disable the BGP toggle and enable the OSPF toggle:
3. Create an Area definition (only a single Area can be created). The type can be either Normal or NSSA and the authentication method can be one of the usual for OSPF; Type 0 (None), Type 1 (Plaintext) or Type 2 (MD5):
4. Configure each interface to be used in the OSPF process. Each interface and area can be handily selected from the dropdown, then set the Enabled toggle. Interfaces can be of type broadcast (DR/BDR) or P2P:
5. To advertise out overlay segments to the physical world, create a route redistribution policy, selecting the types of routes to advertise e.g. T1 connected and select OSPF as the Destination Protocol:
6. Then don’t forgot to enable the newly created OSPF route redistribution:
As long as the physical network has also been setup there should now be a few neighbours forming, which can be viewed directly in the NSX UI:
And a similar view from the physical world:
Finally, here’s some routes of Segments that are connected to a T1, “advertised” to the T0, then redistributed out to the physical network using ECMP OSPF from the T0 SRs:
1338network 