This section describes the networking and load balancer options for vSphere IaaS control plane on a vSAN Stretched Cluster topology in active/active mode.

A Supervisor can either use a vDS networking stack or NSX to provide connectivity to the Supervisor control plane VMs, services, and workloads.

A Supervisor that is backed by a vDS can use the NSX Advanced Load Balancer or HAProxy.

A Supervisor that is configured with NSX can use the NSX Advanced Load Balancer or the NSX Edge load balancer.

It is recommended to follow the networking design considerations as documented in the Networking Requirements, Bandwidth and Latency Requirements, Network Design Considerations, and Configuration of the Network from the Data Sites to the Witness sections of the vSAN Stretched Cluster Guide.

Before deciding which load balancer to use in your deployment, review the component behaviour, advantages, and disadvantages of each load balancer.

A Supervisor that uses vSphere networking can only deploy one HAProxy and HAProxy is not supported in HA mode and hence not recommended as load balancer for the vSAN stretch cluster topology.

For installation procedures, see Installing and Configuring vSphere IaaS Control Plane.

For more information on the NSX Edge load balancer, see the NSX Documentation and NSX Reference Design Guide

For more information on NSX Advanced Load Balancer and Service Engines in a vSAN stretched cluster topology, see the NSX Load Balancer Documentation and https://avinetworks.com/docs/latest/avi-reference-architecture-for-vcf/avi-reference-architecture-for-vcf-3.9.1/deployment/stretched-cluster-service-engine/.