Ensuring Security Posture In A Multi Cloud World: A NSX(mas) Carol

Holidays are a great time of year to take a moment and reflect. In 2018 at VMware Networking & Security, we’ve had yet another exciting year for us—we’re very proud of many achievements. For example, NSX now being deployed by 82% of Fortune 100 companies is a substantial industry adoption data point.  But rather than focus on those numbers, I wanted to take a moment to highlight one of our biggest accomplishments this year (in my opinion). Oh, and in case you missed some of those 2018 highlights, you can catch a replay of Tom Gillis’ keynote Building the Network of the Future with the Virtual Cloud Network from VMWorld US 2018.

NSX Past

Earlier this year (the end of April to be precise), at Dell Technologies World, we had our external launch of the Virtual Cloud Network. The problem statement was simple: our customers were embarking on a digital transformation journey in their respective lines of business and with those efforts came challenges around a new level of networking complexity. Their goal within their organizations was to move from centralized data centers to hyper-distributed centers of applications and data, typically spanning multiple locations, multiple geos, Continue reading

The Virtual Cloud Network Demystified

Introduction

Welcome to Summer 2018!  It’s been nearly one month now since our CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the Virtual Cloud Network vision at Dell Technologies world in Las Vegas.  Essentially the reveal (in my personal opinion) was focused on raising awareness that VMware has now delivered to the market what many of you have heard for quite some time now as “the vision” for networking and security, whereas NSX has become an integral part of many various parts of your business:

Enter stage left, the Virtual Cloud Network.  VCN builds upon the fundamentals you’re already familiar with from NSX—these include (but are not limited to) integrated security, consistent connectivity, and inherit automation, but really focuses on tying together an end-to-end architecture that allows our customers to deliver applications and services everywhere.  Our customers have asked and we have listened… the demand for any infrastructure, any cloud, any transport, any device, and any application has drastically changed the landscape and technologies associated with building/architecting and having a modern enterprise network.

We’ve been quite busy over the past month with lots of interest coming from partners and customers wondering what this really means.  Well today the wait Continue reading

Introducing VMware NSX-T Reference Design

Available now is the VMware NSX-T Reference Design Guide, a deployment path to adopting NSX with diverse multi-domain workload requirements – multi-cloud (private/public), multi-hypervisor, and multiple application frameworks (VMs, PaaS and containers).

Since VMware acquired Nicira almost five years ago, NSX for vSphere has become de-facto standard for private cloud solutions, delivering key use cases in private cloud – namely security, automation and application continuity.  Since then, we’ve witnessed our customers datacenter and workload requirements changing; therefore, the demand for a platform that not only can deliver current private cloud requirements, but now many enterprises are looking for integration with the likes of cloud native apps, public/hybrid cloud, and other compute domains covering multiple hypervisors.

VMware NSX-T was introduced last year to meet the demands of the containerized workload, multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud. The NSX-T platform is focused on a diverse set of use cases – from private to public, traditional (multi-tiered architecture) to container (microservices architecture) based apps, automation and monitoring of security at IaaS, to programmatic devops workloads in PaaS and CaaS environments.  It is very important to start with an understanding of NSX-T architecture and its components, and some topics (ex. routing) have been discussed Continue reading

VMware NSX/Kubernetes and F5 – A Cloud Native App Integration

Introduction

When Bob Dylan wrote back in the 60’s “times they are a-changin” it’s very possible he knew how true that would be today.  Last week, we saw a few things announced in the container technology space during the DockerCon event in Copenhagen – but one thing that I believe came as a surprise to many was Docker’s announcement to begin including Kubernetes in Docker Enterprise edition sometime in early 2018.  This doesn’t concede or mark the death of Docker’s own scheduling and orchestration platform, Docker Swarm, but it does underscore what we’ve heard from many of our customers for quite some time now – almost every IT organization that is using/evaluating containers has jumped on the Kubernetes bandwagon.  In fact, many of you are probably already familiar with the integration supported today with NSX-T 2.0 and Kubernetes from the post that Yves did earlier in the year…

In the past few years, we’ve heard a lot about this idea of digital transformation and what it means for today’s enterprise.  Typically, a part of this transformation is something called infrastructure modernization, and this happens because most IT environments today have some hurdles that need to Continue reading

VMware NSX/Kubernetes and F5 – A Cloud Native App Integration

Introduction When Bob Dylan wrote back in the 60’s “times they are a-changin” it’s very possible he knew how true that would be today.  Last week, we saw a few things announced in the container technology space during the DockerCon event in Copenhagen – but one thing that I believe came as a surprise to... Read more →

VMware NSX and vRNI Enabling Customer Operations

Recently, we had a customer challenge our team to prove to them the operational gains and demonstrate the cross-functional tooling VMware provides to assist them in scaling from zero to hundreds of VMs on the platform.  Our goal was simple –  exhibit a complete lifecycle for any customer to go from evaluation to production operation... Read more →

VMware NSX and vRNI Enabling Customer Operations

Recently, we had a customer challenge our team to prove to them the operational gains and demonstrate the cross-functional tooling VMware provides to assist them in scaling from zero to hundreds of VMs on the platform.  Our goal was simple –  exhibit a complete lifecycle for any customer to go from evaluation to production operation thereby enabling customer operations.  The result was a video summary demoing our enhanced tooling that complements our simple three-step workflow: environmental assessment, plan and enforcement, and then continuous monitoring.

Step 1 – Environmental Assessment:

Understanding your environment is crucial in today’s modern world of IT – and is especially key at the early stages of identifying an easy to implement micro-segmentation plan.  We’ve made this process very easy (even if you don’t have NSX in your environment yet!).  VMware offers the free VMware Virtual Network Assessment that will take that identified traffic and start to make suggested firewall and security recommendations.  Additionally, we provide correlated data and analysis to highlight useful metrics that are top-of-mind for network operators – such as the amount of East-West/North-South traffic present in your network, or how much data is seen on Continue reading