vRA 8 Network Profiles: Outbound

The next network profile, we want to talk about is the outbound network type.

The configuration of the network profile is the same as for routed networks, so will skip the discussion here – the only difference is the configuration on the blueprint.

So what is the difference between routed and outbound?

Outbound networks limits network traffic to occur between the compute resources in the deployment but also allows one-way outbound network traffic.

Routed networks contain a routable IP space divided across available subnets that are linked together. The virtual machines that are provisioned with routed networks, and that have the same routed network profile, can communicate with each other and with an existing network.

If you configure an outbound network, the following items will be provisioned:

• A logical Switch
• A DHCP Server
• A T-1 gateway
• One-to-many SNAT rule

In addition, a NAT route advertisement will be created.

Creating an outbound network from a blueprint is easy. The following snippet shows an appropriate blueprint:

formatVersion: 1
inputs:
  name:
    type: string
    title: VM Name
    description: Name of the virtual machine
resources:
  Cloud_Machine_1:
    type: Cloud.Machine
    properties:
      flavor: small
      image: Ubuntu1804
      cloudConfig: |
        #cloudconfig
        repo_update: true
        repo_upgrade: all
        package_update: true
        package_upgrade: all
        hostname: ${input.name}
        manage_etc_hosts: true
      networks:
        - network: '${resource.Cloud_NSX_Network_1.id}'
      name: Ubuntu
  Cloud_NSX_Network_1:
    type: Cloud.NSX.Network
    properties:
      networkType: outbound