A couple of months ago in my NSX-v 6.3 and NSX-T 1.1 release post I focused around NSX-v features as that has become the mainstream version that most people know and work with…however NSX, in it’s Nicira roots has always been about multi-hypervisor and has always had an MH version that worked with Openstack deployments. The NSBU has big plans for NSX beyond vSphere and during the NSX vExpert session we got to see a little about how NSX-T will look beyond version 1.1.

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. As you can see before the existing use cases for NSX-T are mainly focused around devops, micro-segmentation and multi-tenant infrastructure.

What’s in NSX-T 2.0:

The short answer to this is a focus on expanding NSX to public clouds, containers and platform as a service workloads. We have already seen a tech preview at VMworld of NSX working with AWS instances and the partnership between VMware and AWS is even more of a driver for this cross cloud compute and networking landscape to allow NSX-T to shine.

Expanded Networking and Security into Public Cloud and Containers:

Centralised security policy management

NSX for Public Cloud (AWS)

NSX for Cross-Cloud Services (AWS)

NSX for Containers and PaaS (Kubernetes, Openshift)

Platform Capabilities:

Distributed L3 at scale decoupled from vCenter

Intel DPDK Edge Line Rate packet performance

L2/L3 redundant control and data plane

ESXi and KVM (RHEL/Ubuntu)

Independant NSX interface thats multi vCenter

Scale out control plane and scale out edge cluster

VM and Containers Hosts

Feature Capabilities:

Distributed Routing, eBGP, NAT, BFD, ECMP, route-maps, 4 byte ASN

REST/JSON OpenAPI Specification

VIO, Upstream Openstack support

Geneve Encapsulation, QoS, Software L2 Bridge

Distributed stateful firewall, tag based security grouping

DHCP Server and Relay

IPFIX, Port Mirroring, Port Connectivity, Trace Flow, Backup & Restore

Log Insight Content Management Pack

Where do NSX-v and NSX-T Play:

Conclusion:

When it comes to the NSX-T 2.0 feature capabilities, many of them are a case of bringing NSX-T up to speed to where NSX-v is, however the thing to think about is that how those capabilities will or could be used beyond vSphere environments…that is the big picture to consider here around the future of NSX!

For an overview of what’s was released in NSX-T 2.0, the release notes can be found here, or have a read of my launch post here.

References:

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