Visibility Manager Deployment Model

With Visibility Manager, you can manage packet broker devices across multiple data centers and geographic locations.

You can separate your network into regions and further separate regions into zones. A zone is a set of locations (at least one and no more than five) where packet broker devices reside.

Note

See the Extreme Visibility Manager Release Notes, 6.0.0 for any limitations on supported regions.

In this example, a map of the United States is separated into seven regions. Each region contains one or more zones. Each zone is a state with a data center.

Map of the US broken out into 7 regions. Region 1 (Northeast) consists of Main, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Region 2 (Southeast) consists of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland. Region 3 (Midwest) consists of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio. Region 4 (Southwest) consists of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma. Region 5 (Rocky Mountains) consists of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado. Region 6 (Pacific) consists of Washington, Oregon, California. Region 7 (Non-contiguous) consists of Hawaii and Alaska.

Each region is a Kubernetes cluster that is managed by a control plane. Having multiple small clusters rather than one large cluster ensures better fault isolation. If one cluster fails, the other clusters provide failover assistance. All clusters are deployed on virtual machines (VMs).

In the following diagram, you can see the Kubernetes cluster, with the control plane, region nodes, and zone nodes.

The example Kubernetes cluster consists of one control plane, three regions nodes, and two zone nodes.

In this next diagram, you see how zones can have multiple locations, which tell you where packet broker devices are located.

One region with two zones. Zone one has two locations. Location one has 3 devices. Location two has two devices. Zone 2 has 1 location with 3 devices

You identify all zones and regions in a CSV file that is incorporated into Visibility Manager during installation. For more information, see Create a Location Definition File.

For information about deploying the control plan, region, and zone VMs, see Installing Visibility Manager.