“We see greater potential strategic opportunity in NSX over the next decade than our franchise product vSphere has had for the past decade.”
said VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger talking about NSX’s capability to reach $1B this fiscal year.
VMware NSX, launched in August 2013, unifies in a single platform Nicira NVP (that the company acquired in July 2012 for approximately $1B) and VMware vCloud Network and Security, covering the entire network and security model from Layer 2 to Layer 7 and integrating in the hypervisor to ability to manage switching, bridging, routing and firewall.
This month VMware published a technical white paper titled Introducing the NSX-T Platform to explain its new architecture described as follows:
The NSX-T architecture has built-in separation of the data plane, control plane and management plane. This separation delivers multiple benefits, including scalability, performance, resiliency and heterogeneity. In this section, we’ll walk you through each layer and its specific role and characteristics.
VMware NSX-T is a second platform in the NSX family, focused on emerging application frameworks and architectures that have heterogeneous endpoints and technology stacks aka supporting non-vSphere environments.
The 10 pages paper contains the following sections:
- Introduction
- Networking and security today
- How NSX-T addresses these trends and challenges
- Architecture Overview
- Management Plane
- Control Plane
- Data Plane
- NSX-T Compute Independent Host Switch
- Routing Scale and Performance
- Routing and Convergence
- Security
- Services
- Operations
- Conclusion
- Key Takeaways
- What You Can Do Now