AVI Static Route

[dawu415]

Describe the bug
In the Deployment guides, there's a section where readers are asked to fill in the Routes for AVI Static Routes. Currently, the static route prefix input is 0.0.0.0/0 for 3 next hop gateways. Is there a reasoning for these to be set?

For AVI Enterprise, this shouldn't be needed since there's an Auto-gateway that is ticked automatically in each VirtualService. This allows Service Engines to know how to route response traffic back to a caller using the MAC address instead of IP - unless the "Prefer Static Routes over directly connected networks" is ticked in the Cloud configuration.

For AVI Essentials, static routes in AVI are needed, since Auto-gateway is not available. The static routes are assessed on a top to bottom basis. So if the first entry has a prefix 0.0.0.0/0, all subsequent entries will be ignored, since the destination for a packet already matches 0.0.0.0/0. In a single Frontend network routable in from and out to the internet, it is sufficient to have a single static route prefix: 0.0.0.0/0 and next-hop: <frontend default gateway-ip>

This has caused some pain in the field for people who have set these 3, where they found that 're-ordering' the static routes work in one scenario but not the other. I have documented this internally at Central, which serves as a temporary holding place for docs to review before being pushed out to respective public sites on VMware.

https://central.eng.vmware.com/how-to-guides/avi/tips-integrating-avi-with-tkg/#setting-up-avi-essentials-with-tkg

To Reproduce
Example:

See:
https://github.com/vmware-tanzu-labs/tanzu-validated-solutions/blob/main/src/deployment-guides/tko-on-vsphere-vds.md

with step text reading:

After the networks are configured, set the default routes for all VIP/Data networks. Click Routing. Create and add default routes for following networks. Change the gateway subnet to match your network configuration:

Expected behavior
If the deployment guide assumes, AVI Enterprise, we shouldn't need to set the static route (unless there was a reason). Otherwise, AVI Essentials require the static routes to be set.

[smuthukumar-vmw]

Hi @dawu415 the central page is not accessible. However, we will address the pain point and update in upcoming releases.