What is NSX Data Center?

The NSX Data Center

In Information Technology (IT), the quest is always to do more with less, and for that, you need a network that’s secure enough to fortify you from threats, fast enough to meet your business needs, and agile enough to instantly accommodate your demands - while spending less time and money to get it all done.

The NSX Data Center – as part of a software-defined data center (SDDC) - achieves this. It's a totally new approach. It reproduces the whole network, whether the network is simple or complex, in software. Provisioning and managing networking functions (from firewalling, to switching, to routing, to load balancing) in software instead of hardware results in level security, speed, agility, and cost-efficiency that simply isn't possible with the traditional architecture.

For even greater control of your SDDC, vRealize Network Insight gives you a 360° view across virtual, physical, and multi-cloud environments to help you quickly troubleshoot connectivity issues.

For example, if two virtual machines are unable to talk to each other, or there are bottlenecks between two VMs, issues can be quickly pinpointed for rapid resolution. This 360° view also provides you with insights into applications' dependencies (that's all the programs they depend on to function properly), while you're planning application migration to a public cloud, a different data center, or a disaster recovery site.

Different areas of your network require different rules for security. vRealize Network Insight allows you to plan security for applications across private, public, and hybrid clouds. It helps accelerate micro-segmentation deployment by providing recommendations for VMware NSX firewall rules. vRealize Network Insight gives you a view of your entire NSX infrastructure with a powerful topology map that alerts you to potential issues and even provides recommendations for fixes.

With so much control of your networking environment, all your teams will move faster and more safely.

NSX-V was first released in 2013 and met a real need in the market - within a few months three of America’s top five investment banks and several of the most respected enterprises around the world were using it. It went on to become the leading network virtualization platform and continues to serve the needs of its customers. However, times change. Not all applications run in VMs now. Containers and cloud-native apps are increasingly the norms. It was for this transformed environment that VMware developed NSX-T Data Center. (The “T” stands for “Transformers”.) It has some common features with NSX-V, as we’ve seen. Both provide software-based network virtualization using software-based overlay technologies. Both provide distributed routing and firewalling. And both provide automation to increase agility. But unlike NSX-V, NSX-T is not tightly-integrated with vCenter. It works in all types of environments to connect all types of applications. It can support multiple hypervisors (ESXi and KVM); connect with a VM, a container, or a bare metal server (i.e., a physical server used by just one customer), on-premises or in a private cloud, public cloud, or multi-cloud environment; and integrate seamlessly with Kubernetes, Docker, OpenStack, VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Red Hat OpenShift, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Amazon Web Service (AWS), and Microsoft Azure.

VMware will continue to develop the NSX-T Data Center to meet the networking and security needs of the future.