It’s been two years since VMware first introduced NSX, which enables the virtualization of existing network infrastructures. In that time they have been able to add over 700 customers, have over 100 production deployments, and trained over 3,500 people on NSX. At VMworld this year VMware announced the latest version of NSX, version 6.2.
It’s been two years since VMware first introduced NSX, which enables the virtualization of existing network infrastructures. In that time they have been able to add over 700 customers, have over 100 production deployments, and trained over 3,500 people on NSX. At VMworld this year VMware announced the latest version of NSX, version 6.2.
NSX aims to do for networking what VSAN has done for servers. It takes the data center network and brings the operational model of VMs enabling the network to be treated as a pool of transport capacity. NSX is a key aspect to both VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform and their software-defined data center. VMware has taken all that they have learned from their customer in the last two years and added it into NSX 6.2.
Advancements include:
- More Control Within and Across Data Centers – VMware NSX 6.2 adds better support for application continuity and disaster recovery use cases through support for cross vCenter vMotion over VXLAN with routing and security. Administrators can now migrate across vCenter Server systems seamlessly without losing historical data about the virtual machine. VMware NSX 6.2 enables customers to scale out vSphere environments within a single data center and across data centers by moving the entire networking and security model with the VM, without any requirement to change underlying physical infrastructure.
- Deeper Integration into Physical Infrastructure – VMware NSX 6.2 adds Open vSwitch Database (OVSDB) support to NSX networking in vSphere environments, enabling simplified and consistent operations for the entire data center network and the extension of micro-segmentation to physical servers. Support for OVSDB enables integration with hardware switching partners and advanced load balancing solutions through a standards-based mechanism, making it even easier to deploy network virtualization in data centers
- Advancements in Operations and Trouble Shooting – We have a number of new features and I’ll touch on two here. Traceflow lets you synthetically create a packet that looks exactly like it came from a guest VM and inject it into the data path. Traceflow then traces its handling all the way through the forwarding pipeline (switching, routing, firewalling, service insertion), across the physical network, and through the forwarding pipeline again before it’s intercepted just prior to delivery to the remote VM. Every step in the packet’s life is examined, in a manner that is unparalleled in the physical world. The NSX central CLI is a powerful new troubleshooting tool which gives you the ability to capture the shared state run-time information from all the distributed components in the system and present it from one single interface. Unlike traditional scenarios where one has to hop from device to device to collect information and manually correlate the data to build a complete picture for troubleshooting a network; one can now have a single consistent view of information.
Availability and pricing
VMware NSX 6.2 is generally available now and can be purchased with either a perpetual or term license. List pricing for a perpetual license starts at USD $4,995 per CPU and list price for a term license starts at USD $34 per VM per month, with volume discounts available.
VMworld 2015 News and Announcements
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