NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance (NAPP-AA) – Part 4 – NAPP Scale-Out

Welcome to Part 4 of the blog series on NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance (NAPP-AA) where we demonstrate NAPP Scale-Out.

NAPP scale-out is supported only on advanced form factor and also requires the TKGS guest cluster to be scaled out with the appropriate number of worker nodes. As stated earlier, NSX Automation Appliance only deploys NAPP in the advanced form factor.

NAPP automation appliance can scale out the TKGS guest cluster which it deployed, with additional worker nodes. However, NAPP scale out need to be performed from the NSX Application Platform user interface of the NSX manager instance.

Taken from the official documentation at https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX/4.1/nsx-application-platform/GUID-8CC7E83F-C59F-4B61-9F4D-F0151ACACD96.html , below are the minimum number of TKGS worker nodes required to scale out the different core component services.

As my current home lab capacity doesn’t allow to scale more than 5 worker nodes in the TKGS cluster, we will demonstrate the scale-out of Kafka messaging, analytics and the metrics services. Data storage scale-out requires eight worker nodes.

ICYMI You can check out the previous parts of this blog series below:

Part 1 : Topology and Appliance Deployment – https://vxplanet.com/2024/04/16/nsx-application-platform-automation-appliance-napp-aa-part-1-topology-and-appliance-deployment/

Part 2 : NAPP Instance Deployment –
https://vxplanet.com/2024/04/18/nsx-application-platform-automation-appliance-napp-aa-part-2-napp-instance-deployment/

Part 3 : Deploying multiple NAPP Instances :
https://vxplanet.com/2024/04/20/nsx-application-platform-automation-appliance-napp-aa-part-3-deploying-multiple-napp-instances/

Stage 1  – Scaling out the TKGS Guest Cluster

NAPP Automation appliance supports scale out of the TKGS Guest Cluster to a maximum of eight worker nodes. Before we proceed, lets take a look at the current state of the vSphere management cluster where the TKGS cluster is deployed. I have removed the second NAPP instance that will give room for the NAPP scale out operation. The highlighted TKGS guest cluster used by the NAPP instance has three control plane nodes and three worker nodes.

Let’s login the NAPP automation appliance UI and jump to step 6 to edit the existing NAPP instance definition.

Let’s increase the worker nodes to five. A maximum of eight worker nodes are supported.

Once the definition is updated, we can proceed to pre-checks and make sure it succeeds.

Clicking on Update & Redeploy will deploy two additional worker nodes in the TKGS cluster.

Let’s connect back to the vSphere management cluster and confirm that the new nodes are deployed.

Let’s login to the supervisor namespace and confirm the status of the nodes in the TKGS cluster.

Let’s connect to the NAPP UI and confirm that the platform is stable and that we have no open alarms.

And click Done to finish the NAPP automation appliance workflow for TKGS scale-out.

Stage 2  – Scaling out NAPP core components

NAPP scale out needs to be performed from the NSX Application Platform UI. Click on Actions -> Scale-Out

With the current TKGS cluster with five worker nodes, we can scale-out the messaging and metrics components.

Clicking Scale-out will perform the scale out operations for these services. We see additional pods for these services getting deployed on the TKGS cluster namespace.

This process will take some time and finally the platform will come back as stable. Ensure that we don’t have any open alarms.

Now let’s check the core component pods before and after the scale-out. Before scale-out, we see a three-node kafka broker cluster and single instances of the metrics components.

Post scale-out, we see a five-node kafka broker cluster and five instances of the metrics components.

Let’s break for now and will meet in Part 5 where we will demonstrate NAPP lifecycle management. Stay tuned!!!

I hope the article was informative. Thanks for reading.

Continue reading? Here are the other parts of this series:

Part 1 – Topology and Appliance Deployment :
https://vxplanet.com/2024/04/16/nsx-application-platform-automation-appliance-napp-aa-part-1-topology-and-appliance-deployment/

Part 2 – NAPP Instance Deployment :
https://vxplanet.com/2024/04/18/nsx-application-platform-automation-appliance-napp-aa-part-2-napp-instance-deployment/

Part 3 – Deploying multiple NAPP Instances :
https://vxplanet.com/2024/04/20/nsx-application-platform-automation-appliance-napp-aa-part-3-deploying-multiple-napp-instances/

Part 5 – NAPP Upgrade :
https://vxplanet.com/2024/07/06/nsx-application-platform-automation-appliance-napp-aa-part-5-napp-upgrade/

Part 6 – Air-gapped Deployment
https://vxplanet.com/2024/07/07/nsx-application-platform-automation-appliance-napp-aa-part-6-air-gapped-internet-restricted-deployments/