What component is crucial for high availability in NSX-T?

NSX-T Edge nodes play a critical role in ensuring high availability within an NSX-T environment. These nodes are designed to handle east-west traffic and provide essential services such as load balancing, VPN services, and network gateway functionalities. By deploying multiple Edge nodes, organizations can ensure that, in the event of a failure of one node, the others can seamlessly take over, maintaining uninterrupted service and minimizing downtime.

In a high-availability architecture, the NSX-T Edge nodes can be configured in an active-active or active-standby setup. This design allows for the distribution of workloads and provides a failover mechanism, ensuring that traffic continues to flow even if one or more Edge nodes become unavailable. The presence of multiple Edge nodes is vital for maintaining resilient network services and ensuring that applications residing on virtual machines can continue to operate without disruption.

Other components, while valuable in their own right, do not provide the same redundancy and failover capabilities specifically designed for high availability that Edge nodes offer. For example, virtual switches mainly handle local network traffic but do not inherently provide high availability features. Physical routers and access switches play their roles in the network topology but lack the sophisticated high-availability mechanisms that are intrinsic to NSX-T Edge nodes.