NSX Sessions for the Geeks at VMworld 2017

This year at VMworld 2017 we have a great agenda full of highly technical sessions around NSX.  Over the past few years NSX has expanded to meet a variety of use cases as our Content Catalog clearly shows. Based on the project your working on today, check out our recommendations for the best technical sessions for these specific NSX use cases:

1. General overview sessions
2. Security
3. NSX & Cloud Native Apps
4. Application Continuity
5. Automation
6. Design & Architecture

General NSX Sessions:

TS7003KU: Transforming Networking and Security for the Digital Era

Speakers: Milin Desai, Tom Corn and 3 customers

At a time when changes to technology are coming at us at a fast pace, how do customers meet and exceed business expectations? This session will focus on how customers are on their SDDC journey in context of network and security. Through the lens of the customer we will share what drives adoption, technology updates, team dynamics and becoming part of the overall business success.

NET3282BU: The NSX Practical Path

Speakers: Nikhil Kelshikar, Ron Fuller

We will share how customers have found value with NSX by getting started with one of the use cases around Security, Automation or App continuity. We will show Continue reading

VMware NSX Reference Design Guide Update

The VMware NSX reference design guide has been a trusted source for NSX implementers to ensure a smooth and successful deployment. The NSX design guide has been incorporated as a baseline in industry recognized and validated architectures such as VCE VxBlock, Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and the VMware Validated Designs.

We are introducing a new updated version of the NSX design guide  just in time for the holiday break to add to your yearend reading list. This design guide incorporates tons of feedback we have received from our readers and is based on the learnings of over 200+ production customer deployments of NSX.

The updated design guide provides a detailed overview of how NSX works, the components and core design principles.

The main updates include:

Routing Design

We are diving deeper into distributed routing and edge routing best practices. NSX connectivity options from the virtual to physical infrastructure are often left to interpretation which generates confusion with established best practice. While NSX offers multiple options for connectivity we are taking the position of offering more prescriptive guidance in this document. The reader will get a better understanding of the design principles and availability guidance.

Security Policy Design

We Continue reading

Cross vCenter Networking & Security with VMware NSX

NSX 6.2 was released on August 20, 2015. One of the key features in NSX 6.2 is Cross vCenter Networking and Security. This new capability scales NSX vSphere across vCenter boundaries. Now, one can span logical networking and security constructs across vCenter boundaries irrespective of whether the vCenters are in adjacent racks or across datacenters (up to 150ms apart). This enables us to solve a variety of use cases including:

• Capacity pooling across vCenters
• Simplifying data center migrations
• Cross vCenter and long distance vMotion
• Disaster recovery

With Cross vCenter Networking & Security one can extend logical switches (VXLAN networks) across vCenter boundaries enabling a layer 2 segment to span across VCs even when the underlying network is a pure IP / L3 network. However, the big innovation here is that with NSX we can also extend distributed routing and distributed firewalling seamlessly across VCs to provide a comprehensive solution as seen in the figure below.

Of course, there are a more details behind how this feature works and how we solve some really cool challenges in a simple elegant manner with network virtualization which we will cover  at VMworld 2015 in the session NET5989. In the meanwhile if Continue reading

Deploying VMware NSX on Cisco Nexus 9000 & Cisco UCS Infrastructure

As VMware NSX gains broader adoption, we have heard many customer requests for guidance to help them run NSX on top of the latest Cisco infrastructure, namely Cisco UCS and Nexus 9000 series switches.

With customers choosing the benefits of VMware NSX along with the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), the underlying hardware (Ethernet fabric, x86 compute, etc) provides reliable, resilient capacity, but the configuration, state and advanced features move to faster, more flexible software. The requests were for deploying NSX with Cisco infrastructure running in a standard IP-based fabric with the Nexus 9000’s in standalone mode (NX-OS Mode), as opposed to the proprietary ACI Mode. As with any IP fabric, VMware NSX works great with Nexus 9000 as the underlay. The combination of VMware NSX and Nexus 9000 in standalone mode enables the benefits customers have chosen to embrace with the SDDC.

We had previously put out a design guide on deploying VMware NSX with Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000 to help deploy NSX in current environments. Today we are putting out a new reference design for deploying VMware NSX with Cisco UCS and Nexus 9000 infrastructure, providing an easy path to the SDDC while incorporating the latest Cisco Continue reading