About Transport Zones:

• A transport zone is basically a container that defines the potential reach of the transport Nodes.
• Transport zones dictate which hosts and, therefore, which VMs can participate in the use of a particular network.
• A transport Zone can span one or more ESXi host clusters.
• You can configure both the ESXi and KVM hypervisor hosts into the same transport zone.
• Transport nodes are the “hypervisor hosts and the NSX-T edge nodes” that participates in the Overlay Network.
• The term N-VDS is introduced in NSX-T 2.1 and used to be called as HostSwitch in the earlier versions.
• While creating the Transport Zone (TZ), we must specify the N-VDS mode, which can be either a Standard or Enhanced Datapath.
• While configuring the Fabric node as a transport node, the administration must select the Transport zone and the associated HostSwitch [N-VDS].
• The hypervisor hosts can only see the HostSwitches available in the selected transport zones
• Each Transport Zone supports a Single N-VDS.
• A Transport Node can belong to:
  • Multiple VLAN Transport Zones
  • At most one Overlay Transport with a Standard N-VDS
  • Multiple Overlay Transport Zones with advanced datapath N-VDS if the transport node is running on an ESXi host.

Types of Transport Zones:

• Overlay Transport Zone:
  • Used by both host transport nodes and NSX Edges.
  • N-VDS aka HostSwitch will be installed on the host or NSX Edge after creating the host transport node
• VLAN Transport Zone:
  • Used by the NSX Edge for its VLAN uplinks.
  • A VLAN based N-VDS will be installed on the NSX Edge after adding the NSX-T edge to the VLAN Transport Zone.

How to create Overlay Transport Zone?

• From a browser, log in with admin privileges to an NSX Manager

• Select Fabric > Transport Zones > Add.

Enter the following details on the New Transport Window and click SAVE

• Name : <Name of the Transport Zone>
• Description: <Optional, but useful>
  
• N-VDS Name: <Enter a name for the N-VDS>
• N-VDS mode: <The options are Standard or ENS>
• If N-VDS is Standard, select a traffic type Overlay or VLAN.

• View the new transport zone on the Transport Zones page.

How to create VLAN Transport Zone?

• From a browser, log in with admin privileges to an NSX Manager

• Select Fabric > Transport Zones > Add.

Enter the following details on the New Transport Window and click SAVE

• Name : <Name of the Transport Zone>
• Description: <Optional, but useful>
  
• N-VDS Name: <Enter a name for the N-VDS>
• N-VDS mode: <The options are Standard or ENS>
• If N-VDS is Standard, select a traffic type Overlay or VLAN.

• View the new transport zone on the Transport Zones page.

How to Create Transport Zone with ENS Mode?

Enter the following details on the New Transport Window and click SAVE

• Name : ENS-Tranport-Zone
• Description: Enhanced Datapath for NFV
  
• N-VDS Name: ENS-Host-Switch
• N-VDS mode: ENS

Conclusion:

We have discussed the following topics on this blog post:

1. What is Transport Zone?
2. What are the different types Transport Zones available in NSX-T?
3. How to create Transport Zones?

I hope this is informative for you and thank you for reading.

Related Posts:

• NSX-T 2.1 Complete video series: 
• Introduction to NSX-T
• NSX-T Architecture
• Deploying NSX-T Manager Virtual Machine on ESXi host
• Configuring NSX-T Control cluster
• Deploying NSX-T Edge node on ESXi
• Prepare ESXi host as fabric node in NSX-T
• Prepare KVM hosts as fabric Node in NSX-T
• How to add vCenter Server as Compute Manager?
• What is N-VDS or hostSwitch in NSX-T?