The Great Migration: Moving Production from NSX-V to NSX-T
Upgrading infrastructure is like changing the engines on a plane while flying. Here is how we moved a financial client from legacy NSX-V to NSX-T without dropping the banking app.
“Upgrading infrastructure is like changing the engines on a plane while flying. You need redundancy, a rollback plan, and nerves of steel.”
It was January 2021. Support for NSX-V was ending. We had to migrate a major financial institution to NSX-T.
The Architectural Shift
- NSX-V: VXLAN. Separate Controllers. Fragile.
- NSX-T: Geneve. Unified Appliance. Container-ready.
Why Geneve? It supports Variable Length Options (TLV), allowing us to stuff “Container Context” (Pod Name) into the packet header.
The Execution
We chose the Migration Coordinator tool (In-Place) because we lacked spare hardware.
The Challenge: Edge Cluster
The hardest part was the Edge Cluster (North-South Routing). We had to bridge existing VLANs to new Edge Nodes.
The Cutover: We shut down OSPF on the Old Edges and brought up BGP on the New Edges within a 15-minute window.
Key Takeaway
Architecture is evolution.
The migration was successful, but I aged a few years that weekend. Always have a rollback plan.
Sachin Kumar Sharma
Associate Director (Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture Strategy) | 20+ Yrs Exp
Architecting resilient multi-cloud enterprise landing zones, SDN overlay fabrics, DevSecFinOps automation pipelines, and autonomous Agentic AI platforms.
