VMware today announced that its virtual networking software and security software products packaged together in an offering named NSX will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.
The company has been running NSX in beta since the spring, but as part of a broader announcement of software-defined data center functions made today at VMworld, the company took the wrapping off of its long-awaited virtual networking software. VMware has based much of the NSX functionality on technology it acquired from Nicira last year.
The generally available version of NSX includes two major new features compared to the beta: technical integration with a variety of partnering companies, including the ability for the virtual networking software to control network and compute infrastructure hardware providers. Secondly, it virtualizes some network functions like firewalling, allowing for better control of virtual networks.
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The idea of virtual networking is similar to that of virtual computing: abstracting the core features of networking from the underlying hardware. Doing so lets organizations more granularly control their networks, including spinning up and down networks, as well as better segmentation of network traffic.
Nicira has been a pioneer in the network virtualization industry and last year VMware spent $1.2 billion to acquire the company. In March, VMware announced plans to integrate VMware technology into its product suite through the NSX software, but today the company announced that NSX's general availability will be in the coming months. NSX will be a software update that is both hypervisor and hardware agnostic, says Martin Casado, chief architect, networking at VMware.
The need for the NSX software is being driven by the migration from a client-server world to a cloud world, he says. In this new architecture, there is just as much traffic, if not more, within the data center (east-west traffic) as than the data traffic between clients and the edge devices (north-south traffic).
One of the biggest advancements in the NSX software that is newly announced is virtual firewalling. Instead of using hardware or virtual firewalls that would sit at the edge of the network to control traffic, instead NSX's firewall is embedded within the software, so it is ubiquitous throughout the deployment. This removes any bottlenecking issues that would be created by using a centralized firewall system, Casado says.
"We're not trying to take over the firewall market or do anything with north-south traffic," Casado says. "What we are doing is providing functionality for traffic management within the data center. There's nothing that can do that level of protection for the east-west traffic. It's addressing a significant need within the industry."
VMware has signed on a bevy of partners that are compatible with the NSX platform. The software is hardware and hypervisor agnostic, meaning that the software controller can manage network functionality that is executed by networking hardware from vendors like Juniper, Arista, HP, Dell and Brocade. In press materials sent out by the company Cisco is not named as a partner, but VMware says NSX will work with networking equipment from the leading network vendor.
On the security side, services from Symantec, McAfree and Trend Micro will work within the system, while underlying compute hardware from OpenStack, CloudStack, Red Hat and Piston Cloud Computing Co. will work with NSX. Nicira has worked heavily in the OpenStack community.
"In virtual networks, where hardware and software are decoupled, a new network operating model can be achieved that delivers improved levels of speed and efficiency," said Brad Casemore, research director for Data Center Networks at IDC. "Network virtualization is becoming a game shifter, providing an important building block for delivering the software-defined data center, and with VMware NSX, VMware is well positioned to capture this market opportunity."
Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing for Network World and NetworkWorld.com. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW. Read his Cloud Chronicles here.
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