A little over two years ago in Feburary of 2017 VMware released NSX-T 2.0 and with it came a variety of updates that looked to continue to push NSX-T beyond that of NSX-v while catching up in some areas where the NSX-v was ahead. The NSBU has had big plans for NSX beyond vSphere for as long as I can remember, and during the NSX vExpert session we saw how this is becoming more of a reality with NSX-T 2.4. NSX-T is targeted at more cloud native workloads which also leads to a more devops focused marketing effort on VMware’s end.

NSX-T’s main drivers relate to new data centre and cloud architectures with more hetrogeneality driving a different set of requirements to that of vSphere that focuses around multi-domain environments leading to a multi-hypervisor NSX platform. NSX-T is highly extensible and will address more endpoint heterogeneity in future releases including containers, public clouds and other hypervisors.

What’s new in NSX-T 2.4:

[Update] – The Offical Release Notes for NSX-T 2.4 have been releases and can be found here. As mentioned by Anthony Burke…

Actually wait for the release notes. You’ve covered nothing about what is included 😉 — Anthony Burke (@pandom_) February 28, 2019

I only touch on the main features below…This is a huge release and I don’t think i’ve seen a larger set of release notes from VMware. There are also a lot of Resolved Issues in the release which are worth a look for those who have already deployed NSX-T in anger. [/Update]

While there are a heap of new features in NSX-T 2.4, for me one of the standout enhancements is the migration options that now exist to take NSX-v platforms and migrate them to NSX-T. While there will be ongoing support for both platforms, and in my opinion NSX-v still hold court in more traditional scenarios, there is clear direction on the migration options.

In terms of the full list of what’s new:

Policy Management Simplified UI with rich visualisations Declarative Policy API to configure networking, security and services

Advanced Network Services IPv6 (L2, L3, BGP, FW) ENS Support for Edge and DFW VPN (L2, L3) BGP Enhancements (allow-as in, multi-path-asn relax, iBGP support, Inter-SR routing)

Intrinsic Security Identity Based FW FQDN/URL whitelisting for DFW L7 based application signatures for DFW DFW operational enhancements

Cloud and Container Updates NSX Containers (Scale, CentOS support, NCP 2.4 updates) NSX Cloud (Shared NSX gateway placement in Transit VPC/VNET, VPN, N/S Service Insertion, Hybrid Overlay support, Horizon Cloud on Azure integration)

Platform Enhancements Converged NSX Manager appliance with 3 node clustering support Profile based installs, Reboot-less maintenance mode upgrades, in-place mode upgrades for vSphere Compute Clusters, n-VDS visualization, Traceflow support for centralized services like Edge Firewall, NAT, LB, VPN v2T Migration: In-built UI wizards for “vDS to N-vDS” as well as “NSX-v to NSX-T” in-place migrations Edge Platform: Proxy ARP support, Bare Metal: Multi-TEP support, In-band management, 25G Intel NIC support



Infrastructure as Code and NSX-T:

As mentioned in the introduction, VMware is targeting cloud native and devops with NSX-T and there is a big push for being able to deploy and consume networking services across multiple platforms with multiple tools via the NSX API. At it’s heart, we see here the core of what was Nicira back in the day. NSX (even NSX-v) has always been underpinned by APIs and as you can see below, the idea of consuming those APIs with IaC, no matter what the tool is central to NSX-T’s appeal.

It’s time to get into NSX-T! Lots of people who work in and around the NSBU have been preaching this for the last three to four years, but it’s now apparent that this is the way of the future and that anyone working on virtualization and cloud platforms needs to get familiar with NSX-T. There has been no better time to set it up in the lab and get things rolling.

For a more in depth look at the 2.4 release, head to the official launch blog post here.

References:

vExpert NSX Briefing

https://blogs.vmware.com/networkvirtualization/2019/02/introducing-nsx-t-2-4-a-landmark-release-in-the-history-of-nsx.html/

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