Its VMworld show time, which means awesome stuff being announced. VMware’s Overlay Network and SDN Sagas are clearly just starting, and so VMware announced today its Network Virtualization Solution: NSX.
I haven’t been able to grasp any VMware own technical material yet, however from what I could until so far understand we are talking about the first true signs of a Nicira’s integration/incorporation into current Vmware Networking Portfolio. VMware’s Overlay Networking technology – VXLAN – has been integrated with Nicira’s NVP platform. However, this is not mandatory, so you do get 2 additional flavors of encapsulation to choose among VXLAN: GRE and STT.
As it can be seen from NSX datasheet, key features are similar to Nicira’s NVP plataform:
”
• Logical Switching – Reproduce the complete L2 and L3
switching functionality in a virtual environment, decoupled
from underlying hardware
• NSX Gateway – L2 gateway for seamless connection to
physical workloads and legacy VLANs
• Logical Routing – Routing between logical switches,
providing dynamic routing within different virtual networks.
• Logical Firewall – Distributed firewall, kernel enabled line
rate performance, virtualization and identity aware, with
activity monitoring
• Logical Load Balancer – Full featured load balancer with
SSL termination.
• Logical VPN – Site-to-Site & Remote Access VPN in software
• NSX API – RESTful API for integration into any cloud
management platform”
Ivan Pepelnjak gives very interesting preview-insight on what’s under the hood. Though new, integration with Networking partners is also being leveraged. Examples are: Arista, Brocade, Cumulus, Dell, and Juniper on the pure Networking side, and Palo Alto Networks on the security side.
Exciting time for the Networking community!
Data Center Notes 