Announcing DPU-based Acceleration for NSX

We’re delighted to announce that VMware NSX can now leverage DPU-based acceleration using SmartNICs. This new implementation allows VMware customers to run NSX networking and security services on DPUs, providing accelerated NSX networking and security performance for applications that need high throughput, low latency connectivity and security. The DPU-based implementation also enhances network observability across different workload types while simultaneously increasing the host resources available to applications.

DPU-based Acceleration for NSX is a result of Project Monterey, an initiative that VMware began two years ago. VMware is delivering on Project Monterey with VMware vSphere 8, announced this week at VMware Explore. Combined with other future innovations introduced by Project Monterey, such as the ability to support VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) networking and storage for bare-metal workloads, DPU-based NSX acceleration will free up networking and security teams and developers more than ever from depending on generic host computing resources to power operations.

Figure 1: Solution Overview

While we’ll continue to offer full support for hypervisor-based NSX architectures, the option of running NSX on a DPU offers several major advantages for industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, and telecom providers that require accelerated network performance.

What is a DPU or Continue reading

The Case for Self-Healing Networks

Digital transformation has changed the way applications are deployed and consumed. The end-user to application journey has become increasingly complex and is a key objective for the Modern Network.  End-users are more distributed, and applications run on heterogenous infrastructure often delivered from on-prem data centers, IaaS, SaaS, and public cloud locations.  On average, enterprises use hundreds of applications.  The number of end-user and IoT devices have also increased exponentially. They include infusion pumps in hospitals to Point of Sale systems in retail.  These devices access applications from manufacturing floor, carpeted offices, homes or while users are on the move. As more devices and applications are enabled, the network increases in both complexity and value to the enterprise.

What has become increasingly clear is the need for advanced self-healing solutions that compensate for this complexity by helping IT teams shift to a proactive mode of operating a network.  Several tools exist that provide domain or service-specific insights, but it is left to the IT teams to make sense of the volumes of data generated by these fragmented solutions to detect issues and perform root cause analysis.  The dynamic nature of the network, device density, and the volume of data and Continue reading

Fault Tolerant Network Design for Application High Availability

Enterprises are growing increasingly dependent on modern distributed applications to innovate and respond quickly to new market challenges.  As applications grow in significance, the end-user experience of the application has become a key differentiator for most businesses.  Understanding what kind of application performance the end-users experience, optimizing the infrastructure, and quickly identifying the source of any issues has become extremely critical.

The Modern Network framework puts the end-user experience at the forefront.  It helps our customers provide the public cloud experience on-premise with an on-demand network that enforces secure connectivity and service objectives across on-premise and cloud environments.  As applications become more distributed, the increased application resiliency and efficiency often comes at the cost of increased contention for shared resources.  The dynamic nature of the network, device density, and the volume of data and transactions generated makes this even more challenging. Managing network complexity and simplifying network operations in such environments requires a well architected network with support for modern cloud concepts such as availability zones that provide fault tolerance.  Similarly, effective network-level fault isolation requires the ability to create self-contained fault domains that facilitate network resiliency, disaster recovery and avoidance, and end-to-end root cause(s) analysis throughout the Continue reading

Mark Your Calendars – The Modern Network for a Future Ready Business

Applications are going through a major transformation – they are becoming more dynamic, complex, and distributed.  They are often built on cloud-native principles and run on-premises and in the cloud.  As we speak with our customers and industry analysts, we consistently hear about the need to rethink how the network supports this transformation and why it is so important for the business.

VMware is hosting a global online event – The Modern Network for a Future Ready Business.  VMware executives will join industry analysts, customers, and partners to create an event that will be memorable and worthwhile, whether you are a business leader, an architect, a developer, or part of enterprise IT.

In this virtual event, we will take a look at the traditional networking model, carefully identify its shortcomings when it comes to servicing the application and the end user and make the case for a new framework – the Modern Network.  Traditional networking takes a bottom up approach – focusing on connecting boxes in the campus, branch and data center with little attention paid to the apps running on top of the infrastructure. In contrast, the Modern Network keeps the end user application experience front Continue reading

VMware at Gartner IOCS

The speed and agility delivered by fast-moving cloud technologies and modern application architectures have become central to digital business transformation efforts.  There is an emerging realization that IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams cannot continue to rely on proprietary, bespoke, and expensive hardware to perform data center functions like networking, security, and load balancing.  These functions can be performed more efficiently at scale with distributed software running on x86 hardware while also achieving reduced complexity and cost.

VMware is excited to present this public cloud approach to infrastructure and operations at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference next week, 9–12 December in Las Vegas.

Attend our Speaking Session

Tom Gillis, GM and SVP of VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, will deliver a session on Wednesday titled “A Public Cloud Experience Requires a Different Datacenter and WAN Design”.

Tom will talk about how you can bring the public cloud experience to your Data Center and WAN using a software-based, scale out architecture running on general purpose hardware.  Purpose-built hardware designed for homogeneous environments simply cannot handle the fast-moving realities of today’s business priorities.  Businesses shouldn’t have to carry the burden of exorbitant CapEx Continue reading

VMware NSX Achieves FIPS 140-2 Validation

Co-authored with Rajiv Prithvi, Product Manager Networking and Security Business Unit at VMware

During VMworld US 2019, we announced several new transformative capabilities in VMware NSX-T 2.5 release which is now shipping! The release strengthens the NSX platform’s intrinsic security, multi-cloud, container, and operational capabilities.

We also announced the successful FIPS 140-2 validation of NSX-T 2.5. FIPS compliance is mandatory for US federal agencies and has also been widely adopted in non-governmental sectors (e.g. financial services, utilities, healthcare). FIPS-140-2 establishes the integrity of cryptographic modules in use through validation testing done by NIST and CSE. With this validation, we further deliver on our confidentiality, integrity and availability objectives and provide our customers with a robust networking and security virtualization platform.

Compliance-Based Configuration with NSX-T 2.5

NSX-T 2.5 is configured to operate in FIPS mode by default. Any exceptions or deviations from established compliance norms are identified in a compliance report which can be used to review and configure your NSX-T Data Center environment to meet your IT policies and industry standards. Any exceptions to FIPS compliance including configuration errors can be retrieved from the compliance report using NSX Manager UI or APIs.

A sample FIPS Continue reading