Five Things You Need To Know About VMware's New NSX-Based Virtual Cloud Network

'This Is The Platform For The Future

VMware unleashed its vision for the future of networking by launching the Virtual Cloud Network at Dell Technologies World on Tuesday, which includes several enhanced and integrated solutions based around the virtualization leader's NSX technology.

"This is not just a vision for the future of networks, this is the platform for the future of networks and VMware is leading that charge," said Peder Ulander, vice president of product marketing for VMware's Networking Business Unit. "This is an extremely powerful vision of creating end-to-end connectivity and security for any infrastructure, any cloud, any application type, any service and now any transport."

Here are the new solutions that comprise VMware's Virtual Cloud Network.

The Virtual Cloud Network

The Virtual Cloud Network enables organizations to create a digital business fabric for connecting and securing applications, data and users across the entire network in a hyper-distributed world, said Rajiv Ramaswami, chief operating officer at VMware.

"It's going to be a multi-cloud world. It's going to be a multi-hypervisor world. This is about an open-standard based network that can run across any infrastructure, and connect and secure anything and everything," Ramaswami said. With the Virtual Cloud Network, partners can create an end-to-end software-based network architecture that delivers services to applications and data wherever they are located. "We are helping customers build a Virtual Cloud Network today through a software-based digital business fabric that is flexible, programmable and inherently secure network," he said.

To deliver on this promise, VMware launched the NSX Cloud, NSX Data Center, NSX SD-WAN and NSX Hybrid Connect.

NSX Cloud

The VMware NSX Cloud provides consistent networking and security for applications running in both private VMware-based data centers and natively in public clouds. With the new NSX Cloud, VMware will add native controls for Microsoft Azure.

"We've already had support for native workloads running in AWS before, and now we're extending this also to run on Azure," said Ramaswami. "A customer can get consistent security and visibility of applications running on their on-premise data center as well as in AWS and Azure in a very consistent manner."

NSX Cloud solves the challenges of using multiple public clouds, such as inconsistent policies and constructs across clouds, manual operations requiring policy for each cloud, and operations tools that are specific to each public cloud, according to Ramaswami.

NSX Data Center

VMware said NSX Data Center is the industry's most widely deployed network virtualization platform for the enterprise data center with more than 4,500 customers globally. The company has enhanced NSX Data Center to include new container and bare metal capabilities that will enable consistent networking services to all applications and deployment models. VMware also added new accelerated performance optimizations for distributed workloads targeting telco and network functions virtualization (NFV) environments.

"NSX Data Center now has complete portfolio support for all kinds of cloud native applications -- whether it be delivered in an application service, whether it be a Kubernetes services, Pivotal Application Services or OpenShift Red Hat Kubernetes services – it's truly a cross platform, cross cloud networking solution," said Ramaswami. "We also have substantial enhancements in terms of performance that's very useful for large scale telco and NFV customers, but also useful for the higher end of our enterprise customers."

NSX SD-WAN

In December, VMware acquired Software-Defined WAN powerhouse VeloCloud in a move to become the SD-WAN market leader. The new NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud has integration with both VMware's NSX Data Center and NSX Cloud. It provides assured application performance from the data center to the branch to the cloud with end-to-end segmentation through NSX Data Center integrations. NSX SD-WAN enables cloud and application performance with full visibility, metrics and control of all devices and user endpoints, as well as simplified activation and automated connectivity. NSX SD-WAN is available as an on-premise deployable solution and can also be purchased as-a-service.

NSX Hybrid Connect

The new NSX Hybrid Connect leverages VMware's HCX technology, allowing customers to seamlessly move workloads from any VMware environment to a software-defined data center environment running either on-premise, in public cloud or operated by a VMware Cloud Provider partner. NSX Hybrid Connect enables organizations to create a secure and highly performant software fabric that interconnects data centers and clouds while maintaining the same governance and control.

"We now have workload mobility and migrations from any data center to any other data center to do large scale migration of workloads and provide seamless connectivity and traffic optimization across clouds," said Ramaswami.