the administrator should click theTier-1 DR iconlocated within theEdge Node.

Comprehensive and Detailed 250 to 350 words of Explanation From VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) documents:In aVMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)environment, North-South traffic flows through a hierarchical routing structure composed ofTier-0andTier-1 Gateways. Each gateway is further divided into aDistributed Router (DR)component, which runs as a kernel module on all Transport Nodes (ESXi and Edges), and aService Router (SR), which provides centralized services and resides on the Edge Nodes.

According to the packet walk logic for an incoming (North-to-South) packet, once the traffic arrives from the physical router at theTier-0 Service Router (SR)on the Edge Node, it must be routed toward the destination virtual machine (10.1.1.10). In a multi-tier NSX architecture, the Tier-0 SR identifies that the destination subnet belongs to a connectedTier-1 Gateway. The communication between the Tier-0 and Tier-1 gateways occurs over an internal transit subnet, often referred to as theRouter Link(in this diagram, represented by the 100.64.16.0/31 subnet).

The "Next Hop" for the packet currently residing at the Tier-0 SR on the Edge Node is theTier-1 Distributed Router (DR)instance located on that same Edge Node. This is because the Edge Node participates as a Transport Node in the overlay and maintains local instances of all Distributed Routers to ensure efficient path processing. After the packet is processed by the local Tier-1 DR on the Edge Node, it determines that the destination VM is residing on a remote host (Compute Hypervisor). Only then is the packet encapsulated in aGeneveheader and sent via theTunnel Endpoints (TEP)from the Edge Node (172.16.215.124) to the Compute Hypervisor (172.16.215.67). Therefore, the Tier-1 DR on the Edge Node is the immediate logical next step in the routing pipeline before any host-to-host encapsulation occurs.