The NSX Mindset

The NSX Mindset: one’s mental capability to be a determined leader and catalyst for change in the way a company designs, implements, manages, and operates networking and security.

Change isn’t easy.  Especially when it involves something personal.  Unfortunately, though, it happens whether we like it or not.  In the world of information technology change is upon us.  IT Automation, micro-segmentation, application availability, and cross cloud services are no longer buzz words in marketing materials and executive meetings.  These are realities designed and deployed in some of the world’s largest IT environments.  The common thread among these concepts is the new capabilities in networking and security brought to life by VMware NSX.

VMware NSX is a platform for the next generation data center architecture.  The capabilities are transforming the way enterprises approach traditional business problems and it is solving new business problems brought about by a company’s digital transformation.

As an IT professional your long term success hinges on your ability to adapt to new technologies and solutions.  While VMware NSX is disruptive to the status quo, it is at the same time an opportunity for admins, engineers, and architects to become leaders Continue reading

The NSX Mindset

The NSX Mindset: one’s mental capability to be a determined leader and catalyst for change in the way a company designs, implements, manages, and operates networking and security.

Announcing the New NSX Community at VMUG!

If you want to go fast, go alone.

If you want to go far, go together.

The premise behind this saying is the reason why VMware and VMUG are excited to announce the creation of the NSX community at VMUG.  The education, certification, and adoption of new technologies can be met with fear and uncertainty as legacy traditions get challenged.  By building a community, we can provide strength in numbers that can facilitate learning and help people develop a mindset of embracing the people, process, and tooling challenges that come with VMware NSX.

This new community will be dedicated to network and security virtualization.  It will serve as a robust resource for individuals who are motivated to learn more about VMware NSX and its tremendous impact on the data centers of today and tomorrow.  VMware NSX is at the core of next-generation enterprise solutions for IT automation, micro-segmentation, application availability, and cross-cloud architecture.  The community will offer an opportunity for Q&A with NSX experts and product managers, special community content, discussions with peers, and much more.

The launch of the NSX community at VMUG comes ripe with inherent benefits, but in order to show our Continue reading

Announcing the New NSX Community at VMUG!

This new community will be dedicated to network and security virtualization.

VCDX-NV Interview: Nemtallah Daher Discusses VMware NSX Certification

Nemtallah Daher is Senior Network Delivery Consultant at the consulting firm AdvizeX Technology. Recently he took some time out of his day to talk with us about why, as a networking guy, he thinks learning about network virtualization is critical to further one’s career. 

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I’ve been at AdvizeX for about a year now. I do Cisco, HP, data center stuff, and all sorts of general networking things: routing, switching, data center, UCS. That kind of stuff. Before coming to AdvizeX, I was a senior network specialist at Cleveland State University for about 20 years.

I started at Cleveland State in 1988 as a systems programmer, working on IBM mainframe doing CICS, COBOL and assembler. About 2 years after I started at Cleveland State, networking was becoming prevalent, and the project I was working on was coming to an end, so they asked me if I would help start a networking group. So from a small lab here, a building here, a floor there, I built the network at Cleveland State. We applied for a grant to get some hardware, applied for an IP address, domain name, all these things. There was nothing at the time, so we Continue reading

VCDX-NV Interview: Jason Nash On The Network Virtualization Career Path

Jason Nash is CTO of Varrow, a VMware Partner based out of the Carolinas. Previous to Varrow he was an enterprise architect for Wachovia’s investment bank. Jason has been in enterprise IT almost 20 years and originally started as a network admin working with Cisco gear. He maintains his Cisco CCNA and CCNP certifications. He is one of only a handful of double VCDX professionals, having completed his VCDX-NV last year.

When did you first start looking at network virtualization?

I started looking at network virtualization three to four years ago. I think before that, when it was just purely Nicira and some of those types of companies and projects, network virtualization was really the domain of the PayPals, the eBays, the Googles. Those types of companies. When VMware acquired Nicira, when Cisco did their Insieme spin-in, we started to see that commercial and traditional enterprise customers were going to have some very good options around network virtualization. We started to weigh our options and we really started to get serious about it over the last 18 months. Network virtualization ramps up right alongside our automation or orchestration practices and projects. So we believe that to do those properly, you Continue reading

VCDX-NV Interview: Ron Flax On The Importance Of Network Virtualization

Ron Flax is the Vice President of August Schell, a reseller of VMware products and IT services company that specializes in delivering services to commercial accounts and the federal government, particularly intelligence and U.S. Department of Defense. Ron is a VCDX-NV certified network virtualization professional and a VMware vExpert. We spoke with Ron about network virtualization and the NSX career path.

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The most exciting thing about network virtualization, I think, is the transformative nature of this technology. Networks have been built the same way for the last 20 to 25 years. Nothing has really changed. A lot of new features have been built, a lot of different technologies have come around networks, but the fundamental nature of how networks are built has not changed. But VMware NSX, because it’s a software-based product, has completely altered everything. It enables a much more agile approach to networks: the ability to automate the stand-up and tear-down of networks; the ability to produce firewalling literally at the virtual network interface. And because things are done at software speed, you can now make changes to the features and functions of networking products at software speed. You no longer have to deal with Continue reading

VCDX-NV Interview: Chris Miller Talks VMware NSX Certification

Chris Miller is the principal architect for AdvizeX in Columbus OH. He runs the NSX program from a technical and marketing perspective, including enterprise pre-sales support and go-to-market strategies.

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I started my career as a traditional Cisco networking guy. I spent 10 to 15 years as a network architect. But I’d been tracking what was going on in the community, with Open Flow and some of the other technologies. When I saw what VMware was doing, it got me pretty excited. I thought, ’It’s pretty revolutionary what’s going on here.’ I immediately jumped on the opportunity to take part in NSX.

In terms of enterprise customers, we weren’t initially seeing a lot of adoption in the market. Then VMware announced the Nicira acquisition, and Cisco announced what they were going to do with ACI, and heads started turning. I realized, you know, here are two of our largest partners putting their investment dollars behind this technology. And then, when I saw what NSX could do, and the benefits it could bring, it was very clear to me that this was the next wave.

What excites me most about network virtualization is that you essentially don’t have to Continue reading

VCDX-NV Interview: Greg Stemberger

Greg Stemberger is an IT professional who started working in networking in 2000. Working in network operations at Sprint, he managed some of the largest enterprise networks in the world as the Managed Services Operations Engineer focused primarily on routing and switching. He managed more than 20,000 Cisco devices in his initial role at Sprint. Greg has three CCIEs: in route/switch, security, and service provider. He’s also a member of the first group of VCDX-NV certified professionals.

What excites you about network virtualization?

Virtualization is actually nothing new to me, to be honest, because I’ve been dealing with multi-tenancy, which really in my mind, started on the WAN side where VPNs were really one of the first early versions of introducing multi-tenancy and segmentation of the network, and leveraging virtualization-type technology on hardware. It’s just fascinating to see how much that’s evolved and taken off in the compute world. Now, we’re coming back together full circle with SDN. The network is now playing catch-up with how much agility and flexibility virtualization has provided to the compute world. I believe I have been doing virtual networking for a number of years now, but obviously it’s morphed into something much more powerful Continue reading

VCDX-NV Interview: Chris Wahl

Chris Wahl is a Senior Solutions Architect at Ahead, located in Chicago, Ill.  He has more than 14 years of experience as an IT Pro. Chris originally went to school for networking, and has a bachelor’s degree in networking and communications management. More recently he’s been doing sys admin work in sys admin engineering, architecture, and data center focused projects. His certifications include VMware VCDX #104, Cisco CCNA data center and CCNP router and switch certifications for which he also teaches classes, and several other VMware, Cisco, Microsoft, and HP certifications. He is also one of the first VCDX-NV certified professionals

What excites you about network virtualization?

I spent quite a few of years managing every type of virtualized infrastructure you can imagine, ranging from very small and medium sized businesses, to a 16,000 person enterprise with over 1,000 virtual machines. In every instance, the roadblock was always the network to the point where in the large deployment that I managed, we would just plan that any network change would take three weeks even if it was just a VLAN on a port. We could pretty much guarantee that it would be about two weeks to make Continue reading