NSX Cloud – Choice of Agented or Agentless Modes of Operation

VMware NSX through its NSX Cloud offering enables customers to implement a consistent networking and security framework for workloads hosted across on-premises data center (DC) and public clouds such as AWS and Azure.

Every cloud orchestration and management tool, immaterial of what use case it has set out to solve has one question to answer: If it is an agent-based solution or an agentless solution. More often than not, the answer to this question has direct implications for the ability of the cloud admin team to deploy and manage the solution.

But, do we really have to choose?! What if we can have both agented and agentless modes of operation?! That’s the question we asked ourselves with VMware NSX and here we are with NSX-T 2.5.

Meet the New NSX Cloud Modes of Operation

What is NSX Enforced Mode?

NSX Enforced Mode provides a “consistent” security and networking policy framework between your on-premises DC and public cloud environment. You can have a unified–corporate-wide-firewall-policy which will be enforced as an NSX Policy, by having an nsx footprint inside each virtual machine running in the cloud.

Why is it Required?

Well, NSX architecture has 3 layers:

• Management-plane
• Control-plane
• Data-plane

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NSX-T 2.4 – NSX Cloud eases your Adoption/Operations between on-premises Datacenter, AWS and Azure

2018 was a great year for NSX with Cloud seeing increased customer traction, strong partnerships established across the board, and a whole host of new features being released throughout the year! While most of our competitors are just starting on their public cloud solution, NSX Cloud is entering its second year of adoption, enabling consistent networking and security across on-premises Datacenter, AWS, and Azure. With NSX-T 2.4, we’re extending our industry-leading capabilities, which will further enable our customers to seamlessly, & consistently manage their public cloud and private cloud workloads.

If you would like to have a refresher on NSX Cloud before we get into the details of what’s new in NSX-T 2.4, here are some pointers to our previous blogs:

• NSX Cloud – Overview
• NSX Cloud – Consistent Security Posture across Hybrid Cloud
• NSX-T 2.3 – NSX Cloud Feature Updates

At a high level these are some of the key NSX Cloud features that were released in NSX-T 2.4:

• Shared Gateway in Transit VPC/VNET for simplified, faster onboarding and consolidation
• VPN support in Public Cloud
• Selective North-South Service Insertion and Partner Integration
• Micro-segmentation on Horizon Cloud for Azure.
• Declarative Policy for Hybrid Workloads

Now, let’s Continue reading

VMware NSX Cloud at AWS re:Invent 2018

Howdy… if you have managed to check-in and get your AWS re:Invent pass, congratulations! Looks like running between AWS sessions across hotels in Las Vegas is the new Turkey Trot – welcome to the “Cloud First” world! Amongst all the craziness, we just wanted to take a moment and send a note to you from the NSX team.

As all of you know, NSX Cloud supports Azure and AWS since our latest NSX release – NSX 2.3. NSX Cloud will be showcased at the NSX demo pod at the VMware booth (Booth#2201) at AWS re:Invent (Sands Expo, Venetian). Our product experts are looking forward to meeting customers, answering product and use-case questions, and showcasing demos.

During the event, there will be multiple theatre presentations on NSX Cloud with a lot of swags to grab. For customer/partner meetings on NSX Cloud during the event, please reach out to the PM team (Percy Wadia, Shiva Somasundaram and Amol Tipnis). If you would like to take a look at all the Past Blogs and YouTube Videos on NSX Cloud, we have got it sorted for you.

Big Announcements:

The excitement is going to continue even after re:Invent as we will Continue reading

NSX Cloud 2.3 – Support for AWS, Free Visibility into Public Cloud Workloads & more!

We are very excited about the following key NSX Cloud features which are shipping as part of the latest NSX release – NSX 2.3

Support for AWS:

NSX 2.3 now extends support for native AWS workloads. This is a big step towards VMware’s pursuit for a truly Hybrid Cloud NSX Solution. NSX customers can now simplify and scale operations across a growing number of accounts, subscriptions, virtual networks, availability zones and regions in AWS, Azure and private cloud. Furthermore, this opens the doors for adding more networking platform capabilities such as service insertion, etc.  Look out for more information on this in our future blogs.

Free Visibility into Public Cloud Workloads:

If you have an NSX-T based Datacenter deployed within your on-premise environment, it only takes one additional VM to extend your visibility to include all your Public Cloud workloads. Here is how you go about it: In the NSX-T download page, under the Product Downloads section, you will see the link to download “NSX Manager / NSX Cloud Service Manager / NSX Policy Manager”. This is the NSX Unified Appliance which can be configured as an NSX Manager, or NSX Cloud Service Continue reading