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As an NSX vExpert, I was privy to an early access preview of some of the NSX updates that are due to be announced during VMworld 2017 Vegas – This is a summary of all those announcements and, while I prepped the post before VMworld announcements were made to general public, by the time this post is published and you read this, it will be all public knowledge.

Growing NSX market

NSX customer momentum is very good, with around 2600+ new NSX customers in Q2 which is twice that year ago.
Typical customer sectors are from all around, Service providers, healthcare, Finance, Technology, Public sector…etc
Typical use cases belong to Security (Micro-Segmentation, EUC & DMZ anywhere), Automation and App continuity (DR, Cross cloud)

Since I work for a VMware partner (reseller), I can relate to these points first hand as I see the same kind of customers and use cases being explored by our own customers so these appear to be valid, credible market observations.

Network & Security New Announcements (VMworld 2017)

Given below are some of the key NSX related announcements that will be / have been annouced today at VMworld 2017 Vegas.

NSX-T 2.0 release
- On-premise network virtualisation for non-vSphere workloads
- Cloud Native App framework (K8 integration)
- Cloud integration (Native AWS platform)
VMware Cloud Services
- Number of new SaaS solution offerings available from VMware
- The list of initial solutions available as SaaS offering at launch include
  - Discovery
  - Cost insights
  - Wavefront
  - Network insight
  - NSX Cloud & VMware Cloud on AWS
    - Well, this is not news, but been pre-announced already
  - VMware AppDefense
    - A brand new data center endpoint security product
  - Workspace One (Cloud)
vRealize Network Insight 3.5
- vRNI finally expanding to cloud and additional on-premise 3rd party integrations

NSX-T 2.0 release (For secure networking in the cloud)

So this is VMware’s next big bet. Simply because it is NSX-T that will enable the future of VMware’s cross cloud capabilities by being compatible with all other none vSphere platforms including public cloud platforms to extend the NSX networking constructs in to those environments. Given below are the highlights of NSX-T 2.0 announced today.

On-premise automation and networking & Security (Support for KVM)
- Multi-Domain networking
- Automation with OpenStack
- Micro-Segmentation
Cloud Native Application Frameworks
- VMs and containers
- CNI plugin integration for Kubernetes
- Micro-Segmentation for containers / Microservices via NST-T 2.0 (roadmap)
- Monitoring & analytics for containers / Microservices via NST-T 2.0 (roadmap)
Public Cloud Integration
- On-prem, Remote, Public & Hybrid DCs
- Native AWS with VMware secure networking – Extends out NSX security constructs to legacy AWS network

NSX-T integration with Container as a Service (Kubernetes for example) and Platform as a Service (AWS native networking) components a NSX container plugin and the architecture is shown below.

VMware Cloud Services (VCS)

This is a much anticipated annoucement where NSX secure networking capabilities will be offerred as a hosted service (PaaS) from VMware – Known as “VMware Cloud Services portal”. This will integrated with various platforms such as your on-premise private cloud environment or even public cloud platforms such as native AWS (available now) or Azure (roadmap) by automatically deploying the NSX-T components required on each cloud platform (NSX manager, NSX controllers & Cloud Services Manager appliance…etc). This is TOTALLY COOL and unlike any other solution available from anyone else.

As a whole, VCS will provide the following capabilities on day 1, as a SaaS / PaaS offering.

Key capabilities this PaaS provide include the below, across the full Hybrid-Cloud stack.

Discovery
Networking Insights
Cost management / insight
Secure Networking (via NSX Cloud)

The beauty of this offering is this will provide all the NSX natice capabilities such as distributed routing, Micro segmentation, Distributed switching, data encryption and deep visibility in to networking traffic will all be extended out to any part of the hybrid cloud platform. Ths enables you to manage and monitor as well as define & enforce new controls through a single set of security policies, defined on a single pane of glass, via Cloud Services portal. For example, the ditributed firewall policies that block App servers from talking direct to DB servers, once defined, will apply to the VMs whether they are on premise on vSphere or moved to KVM or even when they reside on AWS (VMware cloud or native AWS platform). All of this becomes possible through the integration of NSX-T with cloud platforms that enables additional services using network overlay. In the case of public cloud, this will provide all these additional capabilities that are not natively available on the cloud platform which is awesome.!

I cannot wait for VCS to have Azure integration also which I believe is in the roadmap.

I will be doing a detailed post on VCS soon.

VMware Cloud on AWS

Well, this is NOT news anymore as this was annouced last year during VMworld 2016 and since then technical previews and public beta of the platform has already been available. So I’m not going to cover this in detail as there are plenty of overview posts out there.

However the main announcement today on this front is it is NOW (FINALLY) GENERALLY AVAILABLE for customers to subscribe to. Yey!! The minimum subscription is based on 4 nodes (vSAN requirements).

VMware App Defence

A brand new offering that is being annouced today that will extend the security layer to the applications. This is pretty cool too and I’m not going to cover the details here. instead, I will be producing a dedicated post to cover this one later on this week.

Summary

All of these annoucements are the implementation milestones of the VMware Cross Cloud Architecture (CCA) initiative that VMware annouced during last year’s VMworld where VMware will enable the workload mobility between on-premise and all other various public cloud platforms, primarily through the use of NSX to extend the network fabric acorss all platforms. Customers can build these components out themselves or they can simply consume them via a hosted PaaS. I am very excited for all my customers as these capabilities will help you harness the best of each cloud platform and new technology innovations such as containers without loosing the end to end visibility, management capabilities and security of your multi-cloud infrastructure platform.

Cheers

Chan

Next: How to gain access to NSX media ->

NSX is the next evolution of what used to be known as vCloud Networking and Security suite within the VMware’s vCloud suite – A.K.A vCNS (now discontinued) which in tern, was an evolution of the Nicira business VMware acquired a while back. NSX is how VMware provides the SDN (Software Defined networking) capability to the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). However some may argue that NSX primarily provide a NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) function which is slightly different to that of SDN.

The current version of NSX available comes in 2 forms

NSX-V : NSX for vSphere – This is the most popular version of NSX and is what appears to be the future of NSX. NSX-V is inteneded to be used by all existing and future vSphere users alongside their vSphere (vCenter and ESXi) environment. All the contents of the rest of this post and all my future posts within this blog are referring to this version of NSX and NOT the multi hypervisor version.
NSX-MH : NSX for multi hypervisors is a special version of NSX that is compatible with other hypervisors outside of just vSphere. Though it suggests multi- hypervisors in the name, actual support (as of the time of writing) is limited and is primarily aimed at offering networking and security to OpenStack (Linux KVM) rather than all other hypervisors (currently supported hypervisors are XEN, KVM & ESXi). Also, the rumour is that VMware are phasing NSX-MH out anyway which means all if not most future development and integration efforts would likely be focused around NSX-V. However if you are interested in NSX-MH, refer to the NSX-MH design guide (based on the version 4.2 at the time of writing) which seems pretty good.

Given below is a high level overview of the architectural differences between the 2 offerings.

NSX-V

NSX-V, or as commonly referred to as NSX, provide a number of features to a typical vSphere based datacentre

NSX doesn’t do any physical packet forwarding and as such, doesn’t add anything to the physical switching environment. It only exist in the ESXi environment and independent (theoretically speaking) of the underlying network hardware. (Note that NSX however is reliant on a properly designed network in a spine and leaf architecture and require support for MTU > 1600 within the underlying physical network).

NSX virtualises Logical Switching:- This is a key feature that enables the creation of a VXLAN overlay network with layer 2 adjacency over an existing, legacy layer 3 IP network. As shown in the diagram below, a layer 2 connectivity between 2 VM’s on the same host never leaves the hypervisor and the end to end communication all takes place in the silicon. Communication between VM’s in different hosts still has to traverse the underlying network fabric however, compared to before (without NSX), the packet switching is now done within the NSX switch (known as the Logical switch). This logical switch is a dvPort group type of construct added to an existing VMware distributed vSwitch during the installation of NSX

NSX virtualises logical routing:- NSX provides the capability to deploy a logical router which can route traffic between different layer 3 subnets without having to physical be routed using a physical router. The diagram below shows how NSX virtualise the layer 3 connectivity in different IP subnets and logical switches without leaving the hypervisor to use a physical router. Thanks to this, routing between 2 VMs in 2 different layer 3 subnets in the same host would no longer require the traffic to be routed by an external, physical router but instead, routed within the same host using the NSX software router allowing the entire transaction to all occur in the silicon. In the past, a VM1 on a port group tagged with vlan 101 on host A, talking to VM2 on a port group tagged with vlan 102 on the same host would have required the packet to be routed using an external router (or a switch with Layer 3 license) that both uplinks / vlans connects to. With NSX, this is no longer required and all routing, weather VM to VM communication in the same host or between different hosts will all be routed using the software router.

NSX REST API:- The built in REST API provide the programmatically access to NSX by external orchestration systems such as VMware vRealize Automation (vCAC). This programmatically access provide the ability to automate the deployment of networking configurations, that can now be tied to application configurations, all being deployed automatically on to the datacentre.

NSX Logical Firewall:- The NSX logical firewall introduces a brand new concept of micro segmentation where, put simply, through the use of a ESXi kernel module driver, un-permitted traffic are blocked at the VM’s vmnic driver level so that the packets are never released in to the virtual network. No other SDN / NFV solution in the market as of now is able to provide this level of micro segmentation (though Cisco ACI is rumoured to bring this capability to ACI platform through the use of the Appliance Virtual Switch). The NSX logical firewall provide the East-West traffic filtering through the distributed firewall while North-South filtering is provide through the NSX Edge services gateway. The Distributed firewall also allows the capability to integrate with advanced 3rd party layer 4-7 firewalls such as Palo-Alto network firewalls.

There are many other benefits of NSX all of which cannot be discussed within the scope of this article. However the above should provide you with a reasonable insight in to some of the most notable and most discussed benefits of NSX.