Security

Automation

Application Continuity

VMware’s NSX has been in the wild for almost three years and while the initial adoption was slow, of recent times there has been a calculated push to make NSX more mainstream. The change in licensing that happened last year has not only been done to help drive adoption by traditional VMware customers running vSphere that previously couldn’t look at NSX due to price but also the Transformers project has looked to build on Nicira’s roots in the heterogeneous hypervisor market and offer network virutalization beyond vSphere and beyond Open source platforms and into the public cloud space. The vision for VMware with NSX is to manage security and connectivity for heterogeneous end points through:

NSX has seen significant growth for VMware over the past twelve to eighteen months driven mostly from customer demand focusing around micro-segmentation, IT automation and efficiency and also the need to have extended multiple data centre locations that can be pooled together. To highlight the potential that remains with NSX-v less that 5% of the total available vSphere install base has NSX-v installed…and while that could have something to do with the initial restrictions and cost of the software it still represents enormous opportunity for VMware and their partners.

Last week the NSX vExpert group was given a first look at what’s coming in the new releases…below is a summation of what to expect from both NSX-v 6.3 and NSX-T 1.1. Note that we where not given an indication on vSphere 6.5 support so, like the rest of you we are all waiting for the offical release notes.

[Update] vSphere 6.5 will be supported with NSX-v 6.3

Please note that VMware vSphere 6.5a is the minimum supported version with NSX for vSphere 6.3.0. For the most up-to-date information, see the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix. Also, see 2148841.

NSX for vSphere 6.3 Enhancements:

Security:

NSX Pre-Assessment Tool based on vRealize Network Insight

Micro-Segmentation Planning and application visibility

New Security Certifications around ICSA, FIPS, Common Criteria and STIG

Linux Guest VM Introspection

Increase performance in service chaining

Larger scalability of VDI up to 50K desktops

NSX IDFW for VDI

Active Directory Integration for VDI at scale

Automation:

Routing Enhancements

Centralized Dashboard for service and ops

Reduced Upgrade windows with rebootless upgrades

Integration with vRA 7.2 enhancing LB,NAT

vCloud Director 8.20 support with advanced routing, DFW, VPN

VIO Updates to include multi-vc deployments

vSphere Integrated Container Support

New Automation Frameworks for PowerNSX, PyNSXv, vRO

Application Continuity:

Multi-DC deployments with Cross VC NSX enhancements for security tags

Operations enhancements with improved availability

L2VPN performance enhancements for cross DC/Cloud Connectivity

Where does NSX-T Fit:

Given there was some confusion about NSX-v vs. NSX-t in terms of everything going to a common code base starting from the transformers release it was highlighted that VMware’s primary focus for 2017 hasn’t shifted away from NSX for vSphere and will still be heavily invested in to add new capabilities in and beyond 6.3 and that there will be a robust roadmap of new capabilities in future releases with support extended will into the future.

NSX-t’s main drivers related 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.

NSX-T 1.1 Brief Overview:

Again the focus is around private IaaS and multi-hypervisor support for development teams using dev clouds and employing more devops methodologies. There isn’t too much to write home about in the 1.1.0 release but there is some extended hypervisor support for KVM and ESXi, more single or multi-tenant support and some performance and resiliency optimizations.

Conclusion:

There is a lot to like about where VMware is taking NSX and both product streams offer strong network virtualization capabilities for customers to take advantage of. There is no doubt in my mind that the release of NSX-v 6.3 will continue to build on the great foundation laid by the previous NSX versions. When the release notes are made available I will do take a deeper look into all the new features and enhancements and tie them into what’s most useful for service providers.

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