Announcing VMware HCX+ Initial Availability

If you had to sum up multi-cloud management in a single word, “complex” would be a fair choice. Although multi-cloud strategies vary from one organization to the next—i.e., some use a mix of public and private clouds while others might use only public or only private infrastructures—all multi-cloud architectures significantly increase the complexity and challenges that IT organizations must navigate.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new offering, HCX+, designed to help mitigate the challenges of thriving in a multi-cloud world. By helping to streamline and accelerate workload migration and mobility between on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud environments, HCX+ simplifies complex processes like data center modernization, hardware refresh, data center consolidation, data center evacuation, cloud migration, data center extension, cloud bursting, and cloud rebalancing.

Keep reading for an overview of the major benefits and features that HCX+ brings to the table.

Announcing HCX+ Initial Availability

HCX+, which is in initial availability as of today, is a SaaS-based workload migration and mobility service from VMware that provides centralized management, orchestration, and observability for migration, repatriation, and rebalancing initiatives across multi-cloud environments.

HCX+ builds on VMware’s existing HCX solution, enabling easier and faster configuration and operability. With HCX+, migration Continue reading

Three Ways Operationalizing NSX Will Transform Your IT Organization

By Kevin Lees and Devyani Pisolkar, authors of the ‘Operationalizing VMware NSX’ guide

Virtualized networking and security may appear to be a standard feature of today’s modern data center, but it wasn’t so long ago — what, seven years? — that network virtualization was a new concept, largely introduced and propelled by VMware. How time flies. Today, across industries, network virtualization, in the form of VMware NSX, is the go-to choice for delivery of software-based network and security services. Nowadays we spend less time discussing the novelty of the architecture and more time talking about how to maximize the value of NSX by fully operationalizing the platform to make it a critical driver in your digital transformation.

VMware NSX is utterly unlike legacy networking

VMware NSX delivers networking and security services entirely in software. That enables organizations to move myriad operational tasks into the software layer, but to leverage it fully requires a top-to-bottom rethink of network operation itself. Under NSX, the old paradigm of the network as a hardware silo is gone; instead, the virtualized NSX network is an integral component in the software-defined data center.

Which brings us to the key point: in order to fully realize Continue reading

Advancing from VMware NSX for vSphere to NSX-T

We introduced VMware NSX to the market over seven years ago. The platform has helped thousands of customers worldwide transform their network and bring the public cloud experience on-premises. This resulted in higher levels of automation and insight, which, in turn, saved time and money. However, as customers continued to drive new use cases and requirements, we wanted to ensure NSX was completely future-ready; hence NSX-T was born.

The Next Generation of NSX is NSX-T

NSX-T is the next generation of network virtualization and security platform with a complete L2-L7 suite of services, delivering switching, routing, firewalling, analytics, and load balancing entirely in software. Unlike NSX-V, NSX-T supports a variety of heterogeneous endpoints such as VMs, containers, and bare metal servers. The platform enables a wide range of use-cases in intrinsic security, networking and security for multi-cloud and modern apps, and network automation. The past few releases delivered many new networking and security innovations on NSX-T, prominent among these are the ultimate crown jewels of the platform – NSX Intelligence, Federation, and NSX Distributed IDS/IPS.

Migrating from NSX for vSphere to NSX-T is top of mind for customers that need to transition. Here are answers to some questions that you, Continue reading

New ESG Study on Hybrid Cloud Adoption and Security

What Does the ESG Study Entail?

The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) study is based on primary research and aims to effectively derive IT insights in the areas of hybrid cloud, data center as a service, and data center security.

ESG conducted a research survey of 200 IT decision-makers directly knowledgeable about their organizations’ cloud priorities and perceptions. They analyzed the results and have compiled key results in this paper.

You can use the findings provided in this paper to understand the latest trends and challenges in cloud adoption and inform your own hybrid/multi-cloud projects and data center security strategy.

What Areas of Research Are Covered in This Paper?

Through the IT-targeted survey, the ESG analysts look into the prevalence of hybrid applications and related challenges. The survey also seeks to determine the market demand for Data Center-as-a-Service (DCaaS) now and over the next 3 years. In addition, the paper investigates how important E-W security is considered and contrasts it with the current actual levels of East-West (E-W) security policy enforcement, discussing the potential reasons behind the gap.

Here is a sample chart showing respondents’ opinions on E-W security on a 5-point Likert scale.

Where Can I Access the Paper?

Get Up To Speed on NSX Cloud with 5 Easy Resources

Over the last few years, as public and hybrid cloud adoption proliferated, organizations began looking for seamless and consistent manageability of their public cloud and private cloud workloads. This is one of the reasons why VMware brought NSX Cloud to the market.

Overview of NSX Cloud

In a nutshell, NSX Cloud provides consistent networking and security across hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. The key benefits and features of NSX Cloud include:

Single-pane-of-glass visibility
Essential networking capabilities
Consistent security policy
Granular micro-segmentation across on-premises and native public cloud environments such as AWS and Azure

NSX Cloud plays a key role in VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network vision of connecting and protecting workloads of all types (VMs, containers, bare metal) from data center to cloud to edge.

“With NSX Cloud, we got a very compact firewall policy—easy to review and easy to manage. The power, administratively, is that we go to one place to update our policy and when we publish it, it automatically deploys it to every cloud server instance. This was a big win for us.”

Brian Jemes, Network Manager, University of Idaho
VMworld US 2018, NET1516BU

Top 5 Resources on NSX Cloud

Here is a compilation of the Continue reading

Introducing NSX-T 2.4 – A Landmark Release in the History of NSX

In February 2017, we introduced VMware NSX-T Data Center to the world. For years, VMware NSX for vSphere had been spearheading a network transformation journey with a software-defined, application-first approach. In the meantime, as the application landscape was changing with the arrival of public clouds and containers, NSX-T was being designed to address the evolving needs of organizations to support cloud-native applications, bare metal workloads, multi-hypervisor environments, public clouds, and now, even multiple clouds.

Today, we are excited to announce an important milestone in this journey – the NSX-T 2.4 release. This fourth release of NSX-T delivers advancements in networking, security, automation, and operational simplicity for everyone involved – from IT admins to DevOps-style teams to developers. Today, NSX-T has emerged as the clear choice for customers embracing cloud-native application development, expanding use of public cloud, and mandating automation to drive agility.

Let’s take a look at some of the new features in NSX-T 2.4:

Operational Simplicity: Easy to Install, Configure, Operate

What if delivering new networks and network services was as easy as spinning up a workload in AWS? In keeping with the ethos that networking can be made easier, over the past few releases, we Continue reading

Enhance Security with NSX Cloud and Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure

While virtual desktops have successfully helped address security and operational challenges, IT organizations still have concerns about a growing threat landscape and an expanded security perimeter that they need to protect, especially in public cloud environments. Malware, phishing, and other emerging advanced threats can be used to compromise a virtual desktop to serve as jumping off point for an attacker to move laterally into the rest of the network. Until now, customers could secure their VMware Horizon deployments in on-premises data centers with VMware NSX. We are happy to announce that NSX can now also secure virtual workloads deployed by VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, providing a more robust security posture in cloud-hosted virtual desktop environments in Microsoft Azure.

It’s been a great year for Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure. This service offering allows customers to easily pair their own Microsoft Azure capacity with the intuitive Horizon Cloud control to quickly deliver virtual desktops and apps to end-users in a matter of hours. There is a lot of momentum from customers as they adopt Horizon Cloud to deliver virtual desktops and application from their own Microsoft Azure infrastructure to any device, anywhere.

One of the key features of the Continue reading