What is Key Components of NSX-T

Key Components

NSX-T provides networks that support any application on any computing platform in any infrastructure. NSX-T networks provide connectivity, security, and availability, all through one set of management tools and all in software.

With NSX-V, the NSX Manager centralizes the management of a network and is available in the vSphere Client. (vSphere virtualizes and aggregates - i.e., gathers together - the underlying physical hardware resources across multiple systems and provides pools of virtual resources to the data center.) The NSX Manager is based on the Photon operating system - a Linux distribution developed by VMware and optimized for cloud-native applications, cloud platforms, and VMware infrastructure. The NSX-T Manager, on the other hand, runs on the Ubuntu operating system - a Linux distribution developed by Canonical and used on desktops and in data centers all over the world.

Administrators usually tie network virtualization to their cloud management platform, and NSX can be integrated with any cloud management platform through Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs. A REST API is a software architectural style that allows NSX objects such as logical routers and switches to be created, retrieved, changed/updated, and deleted. NSX-V can be configured through vSphere Client, through a command-line interface (CLI), and through a REST API.

Some of NSX Data Center’s other key components include:

• logical distributed (i.e., spread out but connected) switching which allows you to reproduce the complete Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality in a virtual environment, decoupled from the underlying physical hardware.

• NSX Gateway, a Layer 2 gateway that enables seamless connection to physical workloads and legacy VLANs.

• logical routing between logical switches which enables distributed routing between different virtual networks.

• logical distributed firewalling which allows you to create a distributed firewall that’s integrated into the virtual networking layer, with security wrapped around each workload; application identification comes as standard, allowing you to identify and inspect network traffic, and allow or deny access as necessary; user-based firewalling also comes as standard, allowing you to create security policies aligned to users rather than to IP addresses that constantly change as users change devices/locations.

• a logical load balancer with SSL termination (which decrypts SSL-encrypted data).

• logical VPN for site-to-site and remote access VPNs in software.

• service insertion which enables you to apply third-party services to north-south traffic as well as east-west traffic that passes through a router.

• multi-site, multi-cloud networking and security which allow you to extend these technologies as widely as your current needs and future ambitions require.