Which of the following components is essential for NSX-T's interconnectivity feature?

The essential component for NSX-T's interconnectivity feature is the transport node. Transport nodes are critical in facilitating the network overlay because they can either be a hypervisor (such as ESXi or KVM) or a bare-metal server that hosts virtualized workloads. They participate in the NSX-T data plane, enabling the forwarding of traffic across the NSX-T environment, effectively managing the communication between various workloads and services.

Transport nodes allow for the encapsulation and forwarding of packets over the overlay network, thus enabling features like logical switching and routing. This encapsulation allows for seamless connectivity between virtual machines, container workloads, and external networks while maintaining isolation and security.

In contrast, other components like edge nodes, which handle North-South traffic, or NSX Manager, which manages the NSX-T components and configurations, do not serve the same direct role in the interconnectivity of workloads. Similarly, while the data plane is crucial for actual data transmission, it is the transport nodes that actively interface with workloads to facilitate that communication. Hence, the transport node is key to ensuring interconnectivity within the NSX-T environment.