VMware Cloud on AWS: Advanced Networking and Security with NSX-T SDDC
Announced in AWS Summit in New York last month and also briefly mentioned on the prior blog, Announcing General Availability of VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.2.0, NSX-T networking and security is now available in Preview Mode for new SDDC deployments on VMware Cloud on AWS. Please reach out to your sales/SE contact for more information. In this blog post, I give an overview of the advanced networking and security functionality provided by NSX-T within VMware Cloud on AWS. Continue reading
Cisco certified? Join us at VMworld!
No, you’re not a fish out of water. You’re actually in the right place to be exposed to content that will change the way you think about networking and security.
We know you have spent years honing your skills around switching, routing, load balancing and network security so the concepts of NSX will be familiar to you. Get ready! We will dive deeper into new applications of these concepts to support the enterprise shift to cloud-centric networking and security.
Here is a list of the top 10 sessions for CCIEs and other Cisco Certified networking and security professionals to attend at VMworld to help you maximize your professional development into VMware NSX by covering the personal, business and technical benefits.
Make sure to scroll to the bottom for special NSX Mindset activities.
Top 10 Networking and Security Sessions for CCIEs – VMworld 2018
1. The NSX Keynote: Building the Network of the Future with the Virtual Cloud Network
Monday, Aug 27, 1:30-2:30PM
NS3729KU
Speaker: Tom Gillis (@_tomgillis)
2. NSX Mindset: Clouds Collide, Opportunity Strikes
Monday, 4:00PM – 5:00PM
NET1919BU
Speaker: Chris McCain (@hcmccain). Stay to the end for a surprise!
3. Deploying NSX Data Center Continue reading
Eager to learn about the future of networking? Join us at FUTURE:NET 2018
We’re getting excited to welcome industry leading speakers to the stage at FUTURE:NET, an event VMware has been curating for the past three years. On Thursday, August 30th, luminaries from the networking industry will speak on how containers, microservices, and platforms are changing networking.
Below is a snapshot of the agenda. To learn more about each session and our speakers, check out the website.
Emin Gun Sirer, Associate Professor at Cornell
Blockchains: The Promise and Challenges Ahead for Networking
Ryland Degnan, CTO at Netifi
RSocket: Reactive Cloud-Native Networking
May Wang, CTO at Zingbox
IoT Networking & Security
Ken Owens, VP of Digital Native Architecture at Mastercard
Container Networking
Adam Casella, Co-Founder at SnapRoute
Containerized Microservices and Networking for Cloud Native
Zaid Ali Kahn, Senior Director Global Infrastructure at LinkedIn
The Self-Healing Infrastructure: LinkedIn’s Data Center Network Journey
Marco Palladino, CTO & Co-Founder at Kong
The API Management Journey from Monolith to Service Mesh
Louis Ryan, Principal Engineer at Google
Istio- A Network for Services Not Bytes
The event is almost full, but if you would like to attend, nominate yourself for an invitation here. Be sure to check back here in September for a recap of the event!
Questions? Contact Continue reading
NSX Sessions to geek out at VMworld 2018
VMworld 2018 is around the corner and we have an exciting lineup of over 80+ breakout sessions, customer deployment stories and Hands-on Labs for you from the VMware NSX family!
For the tech nerds interested in deep-dives and deployment strategies, we have a list of recommended “geek” NSX VMworld 2018 sessions to choose from in various focus areas.
Security:
Deep Dive into NSX Data Center Security for Clouds, Containers, and More [SAI1527BU]
Speakers: Ganapathi Bhatt
This technical session will focus on key security features and use cases for VMware NSX-T Data Center in a multi-hypervisor, heterogeneous workload environment (VMs, containers, bare metal), the architecture and implementation of NSX-T distributed firewalls and edge firewalls, and the grouping/policy model for NSX-T Data Center. You will also find out how VMware NSX Data Center extends a uniform security policy model to VMware NSX Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS environments.
Securing Horizon and Citrix End-User Computing with NSX Data Center [SAI1851BU]
Speakers: Geoff Wilmington
Organizations deploying virtual desktop infrastructures are tasked with designing for security, networking, and network services for this infrastructure. This can be a complex design process and include multiple products to meet the requirements. When coupling VMware NSX Data Continue reading
Transforming Security in a Cloud and Mobile World – Security Showcase Session
Over the last several years, VMware has been heavily investing in technology and solutions to transform security. Our goal has been simple; leverage the virtual and mobile infrastructure to build security in – making it intrinsic, simple, aligned to applications and data, and infinitely more effective.
5 years ago, with NSX, we introduced the concept of micro-segmentation, enabling organizations to leverage network virtualization to compartmentalize their critical applications at a network level.
Last VMworld, we introduced VMware AppDefense, to protect the applications running on that virtual infrastructure. This enabled organizations to leverage server virtualization to ensure the only thing running is what the application intended – flipping the security model to “ensuring good” versus “chasing bad”
Meanwhile, our Workspace ONE team has been steadily building out their platform that leverages user infrastructure, to ensure only legitimate users can get access to critical applications from devices we can trust.
The momentum for NSX, AppDefense, and Workspace ONE has been growing exponentially. And our product teams have not been standing still. They’ve been hard at work on some incredible innovations and integrations.
Transforming Security in a Cloud and Mobile World
In my security showcase session, Transforming Security in Continue reading
Become a VMware NSX Expert Today
If you’ve wanted to learn about VMware NSX, a L2-L7 networking and security virtualization platform entirely in software, and didn’t know where to start, this is the guide for you. Already an NSX user, and want to improve on your skills? This is also a great resource to becoming an NSXpert!
Reintroducing the VMware NSX Networking and Security Portfolio
VMware NSX is a network virtualization and security platform that offers a rich, full-stack of L2-L7 networking services such as routing, switching, load balancing, and firewalling to connect, protect, automate, and manage workloads across private, public and hybrid cloud environment as well as branch and cloud edge environments.
The VMware NSX portfolio consists of a complete set of networking and security offerings designed to address customer use-cases supporting workloads based on virtual machines (VMs), containers, and bare-metal.
Here are the core components of the NSX portfolio:
- NSX Data Center is the flagship NSX platform designed to connect and protect workloads in and across data center environments.
- NSX Cloud extends the networking and security capabilities of NSX to workloads running natively in public clouds such as AWS and Azure.
- NSX Distributed IDS/IPS is a fully distributed software intrusion Continue reading
Top 10 Networking and Security Sessions at VMworld US 2018
Although it was before my time at VMware running the Networking and Security Business Unit, at VMworld 2017 we demonstrated our expanded NSX network virtualization capabilities in the data center, and the start of our journey to bring NSX to the cloud.
A lot has changed in a year.
Earlier in 2018, we announced the expansion of the NSX family of products to include NSX Data Center (formerly NSX), NSX Cloud, AppDefense, NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud, and NSX Hybrid Connect.
With the new portfolio, we’ve delivered on the Virtual Cloud Network vision of connecting and protecting applications and data, regardless of where they sit – from the data center to the cloud, and the edge.
To help you learn about this vision and the advancements we’ve made in the products that underpin it, we have a huge VMworld 2018 in store for you. With over 70 dedicated networking and security sessions, we’ll cover everything from the basics to super-technical deep dives.
Below is my curated list of can’t-miss networking and security sessions. Make sure you jump onto the content catalog on VMworld.com to reserve your spot before they fill up.
I’m looking forward to joining all of you Continue reading
Where in the World is NSX?
VMware NSX is going worldwide! We’ll be out and about through the end of the year, spreading networking and security love across America, Asia Pacific, and Europe. Our goal is to help agile organizations move toward a Virtual Cloud Network with consistent connectivity, branch optimization, and security across all infrastructure.
Whether we’ll be at a booth, product demo, talk, or otherwise – we want to connect! Join us at any of the major conferences and NSX upcoming events listed below to chat with our product experts. And, if you think you’ll be in attendance, be sure to tweet at us to let us know!
NSX Upcoming Events
Checkpoint CPX – 2/4
When: February 2 – 4, 2019
Where: Las Vegas, NV
Click here to learn more
Networking Field Day – 2/13
When: February 13 – 15, 2019
Where: Palo Alto, CA
Click here to learn more
Mobile World Congress – 2/25
When: February 25 – 28, 2019
Where: Barcelona, Spain
Click here to learn more
RSAC – 3/4
When: March 4 – 8, 2019
Where: San Francisco, CA
Click here to learn more
Cisco Live APJ– 3/5
When: March 5 Continue reading
Clark County Embraces Intrinsic Security with VMware NSX Data Center
Allen Tyson is a Senior Network Analyst at Clark County, located in the State of Nevada. Clark County encompasses the City of Las Vegas, and sees 47 million visitors each year. With roughly 10,000 employees and 38 departments, Allen has a large network to maintain.
Alex Berger, Networking and Security Product Marketing Manager, spoke with Allen about software-defined networking (SDN), and what led Clark County to choosing VMware NSX Data Center.
The Power of Social Media Communities
When a forward-thinking Deputy Chief Information Officer began talking about SDN, Allen did his due diligence to decide on the best option for Clark County. He took to social media to determine whether that choice would be NSX Data Center or Cisco ACI.
“First thing I did was I got on Twitter,” Allen explains. “It seemed like NSX was capable of doing a little bit more [than Cisco ACI] and it also seemed like the communities behind NSX and the people who were using NSX and the ability that I had to get a response from people was greater on the NSX side. And so, I started looking more into NSX.”
Allen was looking for stories from other customers with similar Continue reading
Networking’s Future, Not Networking’s Past
VMware Continues as a Visionary in 2018 Gartner Data Center Networking Magic Quadrant
We are excited to announce that for the fifth year in a row, VMware has achieved the position of visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Networking, which is defined as…understanding where the data center market is going and having a vision for changing market rules.
Five Years! That’s a long time in technology! During that time, we’ve all seen the rise of public cloud providers and massive shifts in cloud constructs and cloud management platforms. Application development trends have gone from monolith to virtual machines to containers and micro-services to serverless functions and events. Application components are getting smaller, datacenter edges are disappearing, management platforms are becoming more flexible and the basic requirements of networking and security have remained the same…connect and protect applications and data. Only applications and data are now constantly changing with agile development practices and multi-cloud strategies…and the VMware networking portfolio is evolving to make sure they stay connected and protected!
For evidence, look at our recently announced vision for the Virtual Cloud Network.
The foundation of that vision for a networking industry transition to software was started by VMware with virtual switching, expanded into the data center with the groundbreaking VMware NSX network virtualization platform, and is now powering software-based networks from data center to cloud to branch to edge for our enterprise and service provider customers. We’ve led this transition by defining network virtualization; by creating an entire industry movement around micro-segmentation; and by continually evolving NSX capabilities to provide advanced Continue reading
The VMware NSX® Roadshow is Coming to a City Near You
VMware NSX enterprise-grade solutions support your path toward network virtualization, micro-segmentation, application availability, IT automation, and cross-cloud architecture. And while we mostly live in the cloud, we’re coming back to Earth and taking our proverbial show on the road with the VMware NSX® Roadshow. It all goes down this summer, in a city near you!
VMware NSX® Roadshow workshops are designed specifically for networking and security professionals and delivered in a casual, interactive setting. Each participant gets the chance to engage one-on-one with VMware NSX product experts to ask questions, get hands-on help, and network with other people interested in, well, networks!
When you sign up, you’ll learn how agile organizations are using a Virtual Cloud Network as a north star to guide them toward creating a network built on best practice pillars like consistent connectivity, branch optimization, and security across all infrastructure.
Upcoming Events
Join us to talk shop, meet and greet, get deep drives on hot topics, product demos, and guided one-on-ones with product experts in one of the following cities:
Detroit – 7/17
When: July 17, 2018, from 1:00 P.M. to 4:30 P.M.
Where: Westin Southfield Detroit
1500 Town Center
Southfield, Continue reading
NSX Cloud Blog Series Part 2: A Consistent Security Posture Across Your Hybrid Cloud
We now dig deeper into the cloud security use-case. As more and more companies embrace cloud, the cloud IT teams are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that these cloud deployments are secure. Cloud inherently brings in new environments, and these cloud security teams are now faced with ensuring Enterprise security policy consistency across these multiple disparate cloud environments.
VMware NSX Cloud addresses these challenges, offering a common security and micro-segmentation platform across the on-premises and cloud environment. Together with NSX Data Center, it provides a single pane of glass to provision and manages consistent security controls not only for cross-cloud communication but also within each cloud.
Let’s start with VISIBILITY. You can’t protect what you can’t see. As a cloud infrastructure/security team, you may have to manage 1 AWS cloud account (subscription in Azure) and 1 AWS VPC (VNET in Azure) … or you may be managing 500+ accounts/subscriptions, each having multiple VPCs / VNETs. As cloud deployments bring automation and higher levels of agility, the cloud footprint that you would be responsible for can quickly become large and constantly evolve. How do you ensure that this dynamic environment is secure?
Focused on this specific Continue reading
The value-add of NSX Data Center Compared To Open Source Solutions For Cloud Native Apps
Authored by:
Roie Ben-haim (Twitter: @roie9876)
Niran Even-chen (Twitter: @niranec)
In our job as System engineers in the networking and security for Cloud native applications (CNA) space we get to work with many customers on their implementation of CNA platforms. The fun part of that is that we get to hear the “DevOps” drivers and needs of many enterprise customers. Developers using CNA platforms such as Kubernetes (k8s) and Pivotal Application Service (Formerly known as PCF) don’t always have security and networking first in mind; they are focused on speed and innovation. A developer doesn’t want to wait for the networking team to provision service (e.g. load balancing, switching, etc.), or for the security team to whitelist a new app capability. This is especially true in enterprises where “Change management” is manual and long process. On the other hand, when it comes to those same enterprises, there are regulations and security requirements that can slow down the innovation process. To strike a balance, networking and security platforms for CNA need to operate in as seamless a manner as possible to maximize speed and efficiency for both IT and developers. NSX Data Center is a platform built just for Continue reading
NSX Cloud Blog Series: Part 1
On the heels of announcing general availability of NSX Cloud on June 5th, we’re pleased to announce that NSX Cloud was selected as Best of Show runners-up in the cloud computing category at Interop Tokyo. The full list of all winners is available here. For those unfamiliar, Interop Tokyo is a major event of over 140,000 attendees, and this award requires an hour presentation including a demo and Q&A to the Interop Committee, so this award came with some scrutiny and we’re proud to have received it.
Let’s deep dive a little into what NSX Cloud is all about. As enterprises make the transition to a hybrid cloud model, new challenges inherent to managing this hybrid cloud model arise, including: how to extend enterprise network policies seamlessly to the cloud, how to have complete operational visibility into traffic flows across your hybrid environment, and how to maintain a consistent security policy across private and public clouds. These are key concerns for Network and Security administrators as well as cloud architects. NSX Cloud is designed to address these requirements.
NSX Cloud together with NSX Data Center provides a uniform operational model across Public Cloud and on-premises Continue reading
Myth Busted: Who Says Software Based Networking Performance Does Not Match Physical Networking?
100 Gbps Performance with NSX Data Center
NSX Data Center has shown for some time now (see VMworld 2016 NSX Performane Session (NET 8030) that it can drive upwards of 100G of throughput per node for typical data center workloads. In that VMworld session, we ran a live demo showing the throughput being limited by the actual physical ports on the host, which were 2 x 40 Gbps, and not by NSX Data Center.
Typically, in physical networking, performance is measured in raw packets per seconds to assure variety of traffic at variable packet sizes be forwarded between multiple physical ports. While in virtualized data center this is not a case, as hypervisor hosts only have to satisfy few uplinks, typically no more than four physical links. In addition, most of the virtualized workload use TCP protocol. In that case. ESXi hypervisor fowards the TCP data segments in highly optimized way, thus not always based on number of packets transferred but the amount of data segment forwarded in software. In typical data center workloads, TCP optimizations such as TSO, LRO and RSS or Rx/Tx Filters help drive sufficient throughput at hardly any CPU cost. TSO/LRO help move large amounts of Continue reading
Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Integration With NSX-T Data Center: A lab study with Tips
Contributions from: Alka Gupta, Prasad Kalpurekkal
Pivotal Container Service (PKS) aims to simplify how enterprises deploy, run and manage Kubernetes clusters on any cloud. For detailed documentation of PKS installation and configuration, go here. For details on configuring PKS with NSX-T Data Center, go here.
Every enterprise wants to run containers in production. However, primary questions being asked are: “How do I get Kubernetes to work in my data center? How do I simplify deployment of Kubernets clusters? What about Networking and Security? ”
PKS answers these questions with a feature set tailored to the requirements of the enterprises. Read about PKS features in detail here.
One of the features PKS offers is tight integration with NSX-T Data Center, enabling advanced networking and security for container based emerging application architectures, just as it does for traditional 3-tier apps. In these environments, NSX-T Data Center provides Layer 3 container networking and advanced networking services such as built-in load balancing, micro-segmentation, multi-tenancy, central visibility with a central SDN controller, network topology choices and more. We demonstrated this at the Network Field Day 17 which you can see here.
In this blog, we call out the work done at VMware Global Solutions Partner lab on configuring Pivotal Continue reading
Announcing General Availability of VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.2.0
VMware is pleased to announce that VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.2.0 has been released on June 5, 2018!
With this release we have introduced a number of excellent new features for on-premise deployments as well as the ability to manage Microsoft Azure based workloads as part of the NSX Cloud product. VMware NSX-T Data Center has also been updated to provide networking and security infrastructure for VMware Cloud on AWS.
Here is list of highlighted features that may be of most interested to customers. Note that this is not a complete list of new features. Please see the release notes for this release for all of the details.
Management of Workloads in Microsoft Azure
One of the most interesting new features of NSX-T Data Center 2.2 is the enablement of NSX Cloud, managing networking and security for applications running natively in public clouds, now including Microsoft Azure. This feature enables a true hybrid cloud with management of network security in a single view. This feature is detailed well in the following blog by Jonathan Morin so instead of repeating all the details here it is highly recommended you review this page: https://blogs.vmware.com/networkvirtualization/2018/06/nsx-cloud-a-new-and-improved-model-for-end-to-end-networking-and-security.html/
Enhanced Data Path Mode in N-VDS
NSX Cloud: A New and Improved Model for Multi-cloud Networking and Security
Remember the headlines years ago, asking what would win: public cloud or private cloud? Or hybrid cloud? And everyone had different definitions for each? Of course, as it often is with technology trends, our “or” questions have “and” answers. Let’s imagine current day, where you might see one group running an application on-premises with absolutely zero plans for it to go anywhere. In a far-away land, several desks or cubes away, some savvy developers are building a new innovation – it could be a new service type, a new app, a new feature on a website – directly in AWS. A few desks further, and someone indeed may believe that AWS app belongs back on premises. Finally, in the same organization, an IT group is looking at how Microsoft Azure is offering a compelling alternative to hosting an app they’re just not interested in maintaining anymore.
This is just one example of a potential multi-cloud scenario. Each organization’s specific needs are different, yet this array of parallel cloud uses is not a foreign one to many organizations. In fact, in this year’s “State of the Cloud” report, RightScale found that organizations use five clouds on average.
Securing with NSX – Beyond the DevSecOps Paradigm
There are two digital explosions simultaneously happening in enterprises across all verticals. Enterprises are moving at a breakneck speed on every aspect of their business. From managing their supply-chain, making purchasing decisions, targeted marketing campaign to users, creating apps to connect with users and making it easier for users to consume their products.
The good news is technology is keeping pace and is a step ahead in helping the business achieve their goals. These business imperatives are forcing software iterations to be faster and be more efficient. This is leading to newer innovative models around people/processes/tools that we collectively call Continuous Integration(CI)/Continuous Development (CD). Teams leading the charge on CI/CD models are working in a “DevOps” model.
The second explosion is related to the first explosion. As complex software become easy-to-use and be ubiquitous, sophisticated tools can be used to attack enterprises. Managing Security is getting harder. Last decade – there was a belief – I am not going to be attacked. Fast forward today – enterprises expect to be attacked and breached. This is not just a baseless impression. Forrester’s 2018 survey shows that 66% of survey respondents have faced a major security incident.
”It’s kind Continue reading
Viewer’s Guide: Virtual Cloud Network Online Event
Start Building the Virtual Cloud Network Today, join the online event June 5 at 11am PDT
You might not know it yet, but your network is holding you back. Unconnected clouds and data silos prevent your enterprise from securing and mining valuable data. VMware creates connections from your data center to the cloud to the edge – providing a secure, consistent foundation that drives business forward, rather than holding it back.
VMware recently announced our vision for the next era of networking – the Virtual Cloud Network. Join us for an exclusive online event to learn about how your organization can start building the network of the future. To prepare for this event, I not only spent time with the customers, technical leads and executives you hear from, but also behind the scenes, I have been part of many more conversations that I was not able to share. Pulling from those conversations, I’ve created your viewer’s guide for each segment of the event.
An overview of the Virtual Cloud Network by Rajiv Ramaswami, Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services
Rajiv and Pat share their executive views on the Virtual Cloud Network at the beginning of the event. To Continue reading