VMware NSX helps customers build a virtual cloud network

“A digital foundation built on VMware software and with Virtual Cloud Network architecture enables organizations to respond to new opportunities and threats, create new business models, and deliver services to all applications and data, wherever they are located,” said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager, networking and security business unit, VMware. “With VMware NSX, customers are benefitting from virtual cloud networking, taking full advantage of NSX to unlock value from current networking technologies, significantly reduce network complexity, and redefine what’s possible with security.”

Advancing Networking and Security for All Workloads on Any Cloud

According to Forrester, 89 percent of enterprises today use at least two clouds and 74 percent are using at least three or more public clouds ₍₁₎. With NSX, VMware empowers IT to build software-based virtual networks, gain network visibility and manage security policies from a single place for all applications across a multi-cloud, heterogeneous landscape.

VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.3 extends advanced multi-cloud networking and security capabilities to AWS, in addition to Microsoft Azure and on-premises environments. This pervasive connectivity, independent of the underlying cloud, empowers customers that operate across multiple public clouds to take advantage of local availability zones and the unique services of different cloud providers. NSX-T Data Center 2.3 introduces support for bare metal hosts, in addition to hypervisor and container environments. This includes Linux-based workloads running on bare-metal servers, as well as containers running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor. To support this new capability, NSX-T leverages the Open vSwitch, allowing any Linux host to be an NSX-T transport node. This enables IT to terminate an overlay network on the Linux host and provide stateful security services.

VMware is further extending multi-cloud support with support for NSX-T technology in VMware Cloud on AWS environments. With this support, which is currently in preview ₍₂₎, VMware Cloud on AWS customers will be able to implement micro-segmentation with the distributed firewall, grouping constructs, and advanced matching criteria such as security tags across software-defined data centers in VMware Cloud on AWS.

Simplifying NSX Deployment, Management, and Use

VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.3 will simplify installation, configuration, and management with new deployment workflows and search functionality for objects and events. NSX-T Data Center will install components via a simplified workflow, and a new search interface enables administrators to search for objects and events within the NSX-T system and perform operations quickly. Automating application management across multi-clouds is simplified when combining NSX-T with VMware vRealize Automation 7.5, which adds native support for NSX-T to the vRealize Automation Blueprint canvas. Additionally, NSX-T 2.3 introduces new APIs to define policy driven by natural language and declarative statements for security. This will enable administrators to express policies in a declarative fashion which will be able to be applied to data center and multi-cloud infrastructure. 

Security Planning and Self-Driving Operations for The Virtual Cloud Network

With more than 1,000 customers to date, VMware vRealize Network Insight enables application-centric security planning and network visibility across private, public, and hybrid clouds, with unified troubleshooting across both virtual and physical environments. This helps customers build and run an optimized, highly-available, and more secure infrastructure for virtual cloud networking. With new support for NSX-T Data Center in vRealize Network Insight 3.9, customers can accelerate micro-segmentation planning and deployment, plan application migration, and gain operational views to manage, scale, and enforce compliance for VMware NSX data center deployments. Using vRealize Network Insight, customers can reduce business risk, time, and costs associated with security planning enabling availability and migration planning for their business-critical applications. This solution is available as both on-premises software and as a SaaS offering with full feature and scale parity across both versions.

VMware and Arista Bridge Physical and Virtual Security Across the Virtual Cloud Network

With a mix of virtual and physical workloads in the data center, network segmentation must extend across all workload types. Arista and VMware have collaborated to drive tight interoperability between CloudVision and VMware NSX. Through these efforts, NSX security policies can be enforced natively on Arista switches across a multi-cloud enterprise, extending security policies across both virtual to physical workloads, from mainframes to data center to public clouds. This collaboration also marries Arista’s Macro-Segmentation Services (MSS) with VMware NSX micro-segmentation capabilities.

NSX Helps Equity Trust Transform Networking and Security to Inspire Customer Confidence

Equity Trust Company is a financial services firm with more than 165,000 clients and $25 billion under custody. Equity Trust Company has implemented a Virtual Cloud Network architecture with NSX Data Center and VMware NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud. With NSX Data Center, Equity Trust implemented micro-segmentation to improve the security of applications and data with security policies that could follow the application wherever it was running. NSX SD-WAN provides cost-effective, consistent connectivity across data centers in Ohio, Colorado, and South Dakota. With NSX SD-WAN in place, Equity Trust is eliminating the high-cost MPLS lines across all its locations, while helping ensure more secure, reliable access to SaaS-based applications such as Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365.

“With a Virtual Cloud Network built on VMware NSX, Equity Trust will be able to save millions in capex, opex, and lost productivity while giving us an even safer environment for financial transactions,” said John Moses, director, Enterprise Technology, Equity Trust. “We need to explore ways in which we can improve our technology platform to achieve an industry-leading experience for our customers, and we look to technology partners like VMware to drive innovation and virtual cloud networking as a great example of that. We can use this approach to future-proof our infrastructure and achieve the agility and security required to be the best in the business.”

NSX Supports GFL Environmental’s Strategic Growth and Security Objectives

GFL Environmental Inc. is a leading North American provider of diversified environmental solutions that provides local service to more than 2.5 million households and more than 80,000 industrial, commercial, and institutional customers from more than 140 facilities across Canada the U.S. GFL is experiencing rapid growth through aggressive M&A and is adopting a multi-cloud strategy underpinned by virtual cloud networking provided by VMware NSX to help enable business continuity and reduce risk.

“When we looked at evolving our DR strategy, our work with VMware proved critical as it enabled us to extend micro-segmentation and consistent security policies across our on-prem infrastructure and cloud environments,” said Mohamad Alaboudi, manager of IT Infrastructure, GFL Environmental Inc. “This Virtual Cloud Network architecture helped us establish an agile platform to immediately accommodate new workloads. With our anticipated growth over the next three years, we have built a Hybrid Cloud platform with consistent infrastructure and operations across our current cloud environments, one that is ready to quickly integrate any newly acquired data centers.”

NSX Empowers Grant Street Group to Serve the Needs of Government Clients and their Constituents with More Secure, Agile Cloud Services

Grant Street Group helps their clients, including states, counties, cities, municipalities, and school districts around the United States leverage technology to provide good government to their constituents. Grant Street is focused on providing Software as a Service using a cloud architecture running across enterprise-class data facilities in the United States, enabling their clients to access data from anywhere with an internet connection.

“As Grant Street Group continues to experience rapid growth and geographical expansion to support new government clients, our infrastructure must also scale to support and secure our company and our clients. Our vision for how we future-proof this infrastructure depends on automating as much of the networking and security functionality and having a consistent view and control across the data center to our remote locations. This is the promise of a Virtual Cloud Network enabled by VMware NSX.”