introducing vmware nsx-t into dell emc vxblock 1000 · 2020. 9. 18. · vmware nsx-t on vxblock...

Introducing VMware NSX-T into Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 April 2020

H18186

White Paper

Abstract

This paper describes how Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 provides an ideal platform for a multi-cloud enabled software defined network architecture, and how the VxBlock 1000 NSX-T architecture will evolve to meet the needs of the multi-cloud landscape.

Dell Technologies Solutions

Copyright

2 Introducing VMware NSX-T into Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 White Paper

The information in this publication is provided as is. Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Use, copying, and distribution of any software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.

Copyright © 2020 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Intel, the Intel logo, the Intel Inside logo and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks may be trademarks of their respective owners. Published in the USA April 2020 White Paper H18186.

Dell Inc. believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.

Contents


Contents

The shifting IT landscape ............................................................................................................. 4

VMware NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 overview .................................................................................. 5

The management, control, and data plane construct ................................................................. 7

Initial design for NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 .................................................................................. 11

VxBlock 1000 persistent architecture and NSX-T value ........................................................... 16

Meeting requirements ................................................................................................................. 17

Conclusion................................................................................................................................... 18

The shifting IT landscape


The shifting IT landscape

IT organizations are increasingly subjected to escalating demands to deliver agile,

transformative, scalable, and secure applications and services to meet the needs of a

progressively global and adaptive business landscape. This change had its roots in the

previous decade and resulted in the mass acceptance of Converged Infrastructure (CI)

technology as a mechanism to scale the Data Center. The Dell EMC VxBlock platform is a

leading systems provider within the CI market.

The IT landscape is undergoing a significant shift in terms of how applications and

services are being defined, developed, and brought to market. In the digital transformation

era, organizations are increasingly looking for ways to drive competitive advantage by

adopting agile and cloud-centric application development methodologies. Speed to

market, agility, and constant innovation are dominant and recurring themes. This shifting

landscape is characterized by the following:

• Application Proliferation – Driven by pressure to release early and maximize

speed-to-market, line of business owners (LOBs) and application developers are

demanded to deliver applications in a more agile, faster, and more streamlined

fashion. This has led to increased release cadence, more widespread use of

heterogeneous tooling and open source software, and a drastic increase in

application volume.

• Emergence of the Public and Hybrid Cloud Model – The drive to innovate

quickly has led organizations to use public clouds, where there is a perceived ability

to scale up and down ‘on demand’ resources leveraging an ‘Infrastructure as a

Utility’ and a ‘Pay as you Use’ model. However, this hybrid cloud-centric approach

has resulted in IT challenges to maintain a common security, networking,

compliance, and operational footprint across the organization and across clouds, as

well as managing costs at scale.

• Platform Heterogeneity – The emergence of the public/hybrid cloud model and

multiple different locations where applications reside has resulted in the use of

diverse application platforms. Where traditionally applications resided in VMware

virtual machines, they now may reside on a container, KVM hypervisor, bare-metal

device, or EC2 instance. This non-uniformity creates obvious technical and

operational overhead and challenges.

• Application Heterogeneity – As the popularity of the hybrid cloud model has

increased so has the proliferation of applications that are non-uniform and behave

like both a cloud-native application and a traditional application. For instance, a

modern ‘app’ may have a cloud-native-based front-end, but may also rely on a

back-end database that resides on a traditional infrastructure.

Organizations face the two-fold challenge of how to manage the different processes

underpinning traditional applications while also developing co-existing processes and

procedures to cater to the vastly differing needs of the modern application. Aside from the

obvious benefits from a TCO perspective of a singular overarching network and security

system to manage this type of environment, organizations are mandated to do so, in order

to adhere to and comply with business and regulatory driven compliance, security, risk,

and financial goals. This represents the key challenge: How can this be achieved?

VMware NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 overview


This document addresses how the NSX-T management, control and data planes leverage

the technical and operational capabilities of the Advanced Management Platform (AMP),

and the compute and network architecture of the VxBlock 1000, by exploring how they

meet the basic set of use cases. It also provides some insight into how the platform will

evolve to satisfy new and emerging use cases at scale. This evolution will further leverage

the management, automation, data availability, and data center architecture (Vscale)

capabilities of the VxBlock 1000. For additional information, see Architectural Overview of

NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 (to be published May, 2020).

This white paper is for IT professionals who are interested in understanding how a

VxBlock 1000 with a NSX-T architecture can help to provide a scalable, multi-cloud-

enabled, software-defined network architecture. The reader is expected to understand

basic SDN network terminology and how SDN networks work.

Dell Technologies and the author of this document welcome your feedback on the solution

and the solution documentation. Contact the Dell Technologies Solutions team by email or

provide your comments by completing our documentation survey.

Author: Martin Hayes

Contributors: Ignacio Borrero, Robert Percy, Reed Tucker


The VxBlock 1000 is the de-facto standard in CI excellence and delivers proven high

scale performance within a fault tolerant and uniquely robust architecture. Moreover, the

VxBlock 1000 is purposefully designed to perpetually accept new platforms and

technologies and to avoid the technical debt associated with older generation and

monolithic IT platform choices. Built with a focus on High Value Traditional Applications

(HVTAs), the VxBlock 1000 is flexible and adaptable to meet the technical requirements

and challenges of the cloud enabled, multi-cloud, and cloud-native applications

architecture landscape.

VMware NSX-T, or VMware NSX Data Center, is a software-defined platform that is

engineered to deliver a virtualized Layer 2 through Layer 7 set of networking and security

services across heterogeneous endpoints, hypervisors, and clouds. Since its inception, it

has continually provided new functionality and a broad suite of services, on top of the core

set of services offered by NSX Data Center, including NSX Cloud, NSX Distributed

IDS/IPS, NSX Advanced Load Balancer, and VMware SD-WAN. For additional

information about these products, see the VMware Docs site (https://docs.vmware.com/).

In this paper, we will limit the scope of the discussion to the core set of services offered by

VMware NSX Data Center (NSX-T). While there is some overlap between the features

and functionality between NSX-T and the soon-to-be-retired NSX-V, they differ

significantly in terms of scale and their native ability to support cloud, cloud-native

(container), and application-centric use cases in an agnostic fashion.

NSX-T is designed to support multiple heterogenous endpoints, hypervisors, and clouds

by decoupling the direct dependency between the NSX-V management and control

Document

purpose

Audience

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feedback

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planes from VMware vSphere vCenter. This decoupling transformed NSX Data Center

from what was essentially a set of networking and security features strictly bound by and

limited to the core capabilities of vSphere, to a standalone, infinitely scalable Data Center,

Cloud, and Edge-capable, software-defined networking and security architecture.

To understand how NSX-T helps organizations achieve a scalable, robust, software

defined and extensible network and security architecture, let's examine the underlying

architectural components of the VxBlock 1000. The following design criteria are at the

heart of any enterprise-ready, software-defined architecture at scale:

• Architectural persistence

• Availability

• Manageability

• Performance

• Extensibility and interoperability

This paper will explore how the VxBlock 1000 architecture, combined with the VMware

NSX-T software that is configured on the platform, satisfy these design criteria, both at

initial launch and as the combined software and hardware platform evolve over time. To

address this challenge, let us first focus on describing and understanding both

architectures and how they combine.

Figure 1. Persistent Architecture at Scale

The management, control, and data plane construct


To meet these requirements, the VxBlock 1000 offers unparalleled architectural

excellence that includes engineered and systematic performance, reliability and

redundancy at scale with no single point of failure. The platform has been purposefully

designed to meet the needs and requirements of new emerging cloud and software-

defined use cases. The implementation of VMware NSX-T is an example of how the

VxBlock 1000 accepts and incorporates new software-based offerings by leveraging its

native persistent architecture.

This white paper describes this integrated offering, and how VMware NSX-T and VxBlock

1000 together meet the requirements of an ‘enterprise ready’ software-defined

architecture at scale.


The three key elements that comprise NSX-T – Management Plane, Control Plane, and

Data Plane -- are deployed on the VxBlock 1000 platform and enable how it interacts with

the VxBlock 1000 persistent architecture described in the previous section.

A brief description of each component:

• Management Plane — provides a single API entry point to the system, persists

user configuration, handles user queries, and performs operational tasks on all

management, control, and data plane nodes in the system.

• Control Plane — computes all ephemeral runtime states based on configuration

from the management plane, disseminates topology information reported by the

data plane elements, and pushes stateless configuration to forwarding engines.

• Data Plane — performs stateless forwarding/transformation of packets based on

tables populated by the control plane. The data plane also reports topology

information to the control plane and maintains packet level statistics.

Deploying NSX-T on a VxBlock Management, Control, and Data Plane cluster consists of

configuring the NSX Manager Appliance in a cluster of three virtual machines. This

configuration offers availability, redundancy, and performance at scale. Clustering allows

the platform to process large-scale concurrent API requests using REST API calls. A web-

based UI entry point is also available for all user configurations.

Unlike NSX-V on VxBlock, there is no interdependence between the NSX-T Manager

Appliance cluster and an underlying compute manager, such as VMware vSphere

vCenter. This decoupling allows for the NSX-T Manager to interact with multiple compute

managers, including multiple instances of vCenter server, cloud-based managers, and

container instances by means of a Network Container Plugin (NCP). This engineered

flexibility addresses the principle drawback of previous architectures in which the NSX

Manager was tightly coupled with vCenter Server. The new architecture employs a

systematic approach to addressing the platform heterogeneity concerns outlined

previously.

Management

plane



Figure 2. NSX-T – Platform Architecture

Starting with NSX-T release 2.4, the Manager and Controller functions are combined,

increasing operational efficiency and reducing the overall footprint and resource overhead

on the Advanced Management Platform (AMP). The AMP provides a consolidated

management infrastructure to manage multiple VxBlock Systems in a data center. The

AMP is comprised of servers, shared storage and uses network connectivity to provide a

scalable system management platform.



Figure 3. VxBlock System 1000 AMP

The NSX-T Management and Central Control Plane Cluster has been sized and

engineered to be compatible with all currently available VxBlock system AMPs. Currently

this includes the AMP-3S and AMP Central offerings.

Each Manager appliance has three distinct roles: a Policy role, a Manager role, and a

Controller role. The first two roles are associated with the Management plane and the

latter with the Control plane.

NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 implements a fully distributed control plane architecture, divided

between the Central Control Plane (CCP) on the AMP Platform and the Local Control

Plane (LCP) resident on the Host Transport Nodes and Edge Transport Nodes. A

Transport Node is a device that is part of the data plane and prepared for NSX-T. It

participates in traffic forwarding. Examples of Transport Node devices are hosts operating

in the Compute cluster and the Edge cluster.

Control planes



Figure 4. Distributed architecture

This distributed architecture is what allows NSX-T to scale across thousands of

heterogeneous endpoints, by considerably reducing the overhead on the CCP.

As described above, a Transport Node (TN) is a device prepared for NSX-T and

participates in traffic forwarding. In the context of the VxBlock 1000, this consists of the

following:

• All Cisco UCS B and C Series servers that are configured in compute clusters

• NSX-T Edge Nodes (virtualized form factor) that are running on Cisco C-Series

C220 M5 servers and are configured in the Edge Cluster as described below.

Traffic within the system is transported between Transport Nodes and devices attached to

the Transport Nodes (such as Virtual Machines) by means of an encapsulation overlay.

The overlay is a GENEVE tunnel built on the VxBlock physical network (Underlay).

(GENEVE, Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation, is a flexible network

virtualization standard and encapsulation protocol.) Accessibility between devices

attached to the overlay is managed by the Central Control Plane (CCP) and the Local

Control Plane (LCP).

Transport nodes

NSX-T Edge

Cluster on

VxBlock 1000

Initial design for NSX-T on VxBlock 1000


At some point:

1. Traffic will need to leave the system to reach devices/services external to NSX-T

on the VxBlock 1000.

2. Devices external to the VxBlock 1000, and not participating in the overlay, will

require ingress into the system.

3. Devices and endpoints must attach to centralized services that are contained

within a central location within the system, such as stateful in-line firewalling.

The NSX-T Edge cluster performs this process of tunnel encapsulation/de-encapsulation,

north-south ingress/egress, and provisioning of centralized services.

NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 offers a scalable and flexible yet prescriptive implementation of

the NSX-T Edge cluster. An initial small footprint of two physical servers offers

performance without being cost-prohibitive. The initial offering scales up to 16 servers, for

customers who wish to implement additional centralized services at the edge.

Figure 5. Scaling Edge Cluster

Edge Nodes

Edge Nodes are an NSX-T construct that are deployed on the physical servers. These

Edge Nodes can be deployed in a virtual (VM-based) or physical (baremetal-based) form

factor. For the initial VxBlock 1000 implementation of NSX-T, Dell EMC supports only

virtual Edge Nodes. This provides an initial benefit in terms of deployment flexibility and

serviceability. Future releases of NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 may integrate a bare-metal

form factor to facilitate high performance use cases.


The initial release of NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 enables customers to satisfy some of the

most basic and embryonic use cases immediately. Examples include:

• Software-defined Layer 2 Data-Center Scale using the GENEVE overlay

• Software-backed failure domain isolation

• NSX-T micro-segmentation



• Ingestion by upper stack cloud management platforms for IaaS automation

The architecture allows customers to explore the full extent of the NSX-T offering while

retaining the assurance of a fully engineered platform at the back end. These features can

be broadly categorized as follows, together with some examples:

• Networking — GENEVE Overlay and Layer 2/3 DC Scale, Failure Domain

Isolation

• Security — Edge Firewall, Micro-segmentation, Service Insertion.

• Automation — API Network provision, integration with VxBlock Central,

consumption by IaaS platforms such as vRealize Automation

• Visibility — vRNI, vROps and NSX Intelligence

Figure 6. NSX-T features

So far we have identified some key use cases and provided a high-level overview of how

the NSX-T Management, Control, and Data Planes are designed. We have not yet

examined how the individual components knit together to deliver tangible business,

operational, and technical benefits. To illustrate this, the following diagram uses an

elevated view architecture to show how even a minimal single system — a single-site

NSX-T deployment on VxBlock — can provide tangible beneficial outcomes.



Figure 7. Overlay, Underlay, and Control and Management Plane access architecture

This figure shows:

• How the NSX-T Management, Control, and Data Planes are integrated into the

VxBlock 1000 platform

• By what mechanism the planes are consumed

• Which initial Day 0 use cases are serviced

• How these use cases can be expanded upon as VxBlock 1000 and VMware NSX-T

evolve over time

Although Figure 7 goes into relative depth, some low-level detail is excluded for the sake of

conciseness and clarity. For a complete in-depth architectural review of NSX-T on VxBlock, see

Architectural Overview of NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 (to be published May, 2020).

NSX-T has vastly improved the mechanisms for configuring and consuming it, whether by

the traditional GUI method or by a direct REST API integration. This open interface has

allowed the platform to be consumed in an ‘Infrastructure as Code’ fashion by Terraform,

Ansible, Java and Python. It also allows for deeper integration with cloud and Life Cycle

Management platforms such as VMware vRealize Automation, Red Hat OpenShift,

VMware VCF SDDC Manager, and of course VxBlock Central.

The NSX-T Management and Control Plane configured on the VxBlock 1000 AMP will

expose the following methods of consumption:

• Enabling the ‘Infrastructure as Code’ use case

Consumption

and

configuration




• The ‘on the fly’ network and the security commission and decommission

experience modern infrastructures and applications require

• The code-based integration between the software stacks of the modern data

center

AMP Central and AMP 3-S are engineered specifically to support NSX-T with a minimum

four-server footprint, scaling to 16 servers. Moreover, the AMP architecture will likely

evolve over time to add additional capability for intra-, inter-, and multi-site connectivity,

including multi-site management, control plane data availability, protection, and

federation. This allows for both the full integration with VMware Cloud Foundation, and the

positioning of the AMP together with NSX-T as the scalable platform of choice to meet

high availability/mission critical use cases and to function as a Cloud Management

Platform (CMP) within a Vscale construct.

The physical network underlay serves as the transport medium for the software-defined

network. Its design and architectural integrity are fundamental to the overall performance

of the SDN stack. A problem at this layer can have a disruptive impact on performance.

Thankfully, this is where the engineered excellence of the VxBlock 1000 comes into play.

Each subcomponent of the physical network layer is highly redundant and is engineered

for throughput, scale, and low latency. VxBlock components participating in the NSX-T

underlay include the following:

• Cisco Nexus 9336-FX2 TOR Switches, supporting 1/10/25/40/100 GB connectivity

and serve to physically connect to the external network.

• Cisco Gen 3 and Gen 4 series UCS Fabric Interconnects and IO Modules

supporting a mix of 1/10/25/40 GB connectivity at the compute network layer:

▪ UCS 6332-16P, UCS 2348UPQ, UCS 6454-U, UCS 2232PP

▪ UCS 2204/2208 and UCS 2304

• Cisco UCS C220 M5 Servers serving at the NSX-T Edge layer with Cisco VIC 1457

and Intel XXV710-DA2. The latter is a critical consideration in the underlay design

and provides hardware-based encapsulation/de-encapsulation and offloading from

the GENEVE NSX-T based overlay and the external network. This card also

supports the DPDK protocol.

• Cisco UCS B/C Series servers and supported VIC cards.

The Physical Underlay has been designed to scale. From the beginning, the modular

architecture of the VxBlock platform means that the customer is not assuming the

technical debt associated with a monolithic architecture. Given its ‘persistent architecture,’

as the platform evolves, new VxBlock 1000 components can be gracefully integrated into

the underlay. These may include physical servers but also network interface cards and

Virtual Interface Cards (VICs) that add new hardware offload and security features to the

underlay.

Underlay at scale – Vscale and the spine/leaf architecture

The Underlay performs three primary functions. All other use cases depend on a well-

designed and scalable underlay:

Control and

management

plane

architecture

Physical

underlay and

network

architecture



• A physical transport for the Overlay – The GENEVE encapsulated network. A

mechanism in which tunnel endpoints can transport traffic to tunnel endpoints, that

is, in which the system can transport SDN traffic from one SDN Node to another.

• A transport mechanism that takes encapsulated traffic to a location on the network

where it can be de-encapsulated. This is known as the NSX-T Edge cluster. This

‘Edge’ is also the ‘ingress’ point for external traffic into the NSX-T SDN domain.

• Segregating the network into multiple distinct failure domains -- This was the

original and still the fundamental use case of an SDN system. Traditional networks

based on legacy distributed control plane protocols, such as Spanning-Tree and 3-

Tier network architectures (Core/Aggregation/Access), scaled very poorly in the

Data-Center and led to very large failure domains. An outage in a Data Center

network, designed with large failure domains, was usually very impactful, not well

contained, difficult to troubleshoot/resolve, and invariably negatively affected the

financial and business bottom line. Furthermore, it was non-agile and difficult to

change. Because of the potential risk, outages to facilitate additions, moves, and

changes had to be very carefully planned and, in some instances, required

executive oversight and approval.

Clearly this relationship between the technical system and business process did not

meet the requirements of the digital revolution in an era in which applications and

networks are required ‘on the fly’ for businesses to remain relevant, competitive,

and successful.

Figure 8. Scalable architecture

The VxBlock 1000 with NSX-T is designed specifically with scalability in mind. The figure

above shows how NSX-T, in combination with the Overlay, can scale in the Data Center

by minimizing the failure domain footprint -- in this instance -- per Fabric-Interconnect pair.

However, VxBlock 1000 in conjunction with Vscale can scale the NSX-T Data Plane

almost infinitely at the ToR layer.

VxBlock 1000 persistent architecture and NSX-T value


It can scale in this way by introducing a network architecture based upon ‘Spine/Leaf’

versus the traditional 3-Tier Core/Aggregation/Access Architecture. The Spanning Tree

Protocol (STP) is eliminated as a Data Plane reachability protocol between failure

domains and replaced by Layer 3 protocols such as BGP, BGP-EVPN, and IS-IS. These

Layer 3 protocols are much more efficient for managing control and data plane

reachability information and eliminate the use of STP between failure domains. For a

deeper overview of the VxBlock architecture see Dell EMC VxBlock™ System 1000

Architecture Overview.

At this point you should begin to understand how the underlying physical architecture, in

tandem with the NSX-T software platform, allows you to begin to consume the basic

network, security and automation use cases. To unlock these use cases, note that both

the physical platform (Underlay) and the software layer on top (Overlay and NSX-T

Software features) play complementary and equally important roles. Some Day 0

examples include:

• Data Center Network at Scale and Failure Domain Isolation: NSX-T, VxBlock 1000

and Dell EMC Vscale.

• Multi-Layer Security and Micro-Segmentation: L2-L7 Security and Firewall services

delivered in-kernel and at the NSX-T Edge.

• Software Defined Automation and Orchestration: VxBlock Central and NSX-T

together offer the ability to systematically integrate via API with external Cloud

Management Platforms and systems such as VMware VCF, VxBlock Central,

VMware vRealize Automation and VMware vRealize Operations, and other third

party systems and tools. This allows for the provisioning of network and security

infrastructure ‘on the fly’, a key enabling technology that enables businesses to

deliver modern applications efficiently and in a rapid and scalable fashion.

• Software Defined Network Visibility, Telemetry, and Insight: VxBlock Central,

VxBlock AMP and NSX-T together help provide end to end analysis, and insight

into the underlay (the physical) and overlay (the virtual). The software defined

promise of scale, simplicity, and flexibility requires that we have a full understanding

at a point in time basis of the system’s underlying configuration, health, and

structure.

The above provides a brief overview of the benefits of consuming VMware NSX-T,

underpinned by a scalable physical and persistent engineered architecture. Both the

software defined network layer, delivered by VMware NSX-T, and the Converged

Infrastructure (CI) layer are of equal importance in delivering business outcomes and

realizing the base set of use cases.

The next section provides an overview of how both the hardware and software platform

will likely evolve over time to enhance and deepen the offering, to deliver even greater

system availability, manageability, performance and interoperability, and to meet the

demands of the hybrid cloud.

VxBlock 1000 persistent architecture and NSX-T value

The VxBlock 1000 systems’ design on the principle of architectural persistence is key to

understanding how the NSX-T on VxBlock 1000 offer may mature over time to add

Consuming

NSX-T and

implementing

the use cases

https://cpsdocs.dellemc.com/bundle/P_AO_1000/page/GUID-02BD9BF3-FD39-4EE0-B1FA-8CACDEC5091A.html

https://cpsdocs.dellemc.com/bundle/P_AO_1000/page/GUID-02BD9BF3-FD39-4EE0-B1FA-8CACDEC5091A.html

Meeting requirements


increased engineered value out of the box and allow the flexibility for consuming a broad

and deeply flexible software-defined networking architecture.

Future evolutionary enhancements to the architecture will look to add technical

functionality. Some features will be prescriptively engineered into the platform directly,

whereas others may take the guise of solution guidance. The continually evolving

software-based flexibility of NSX-T allied to the persistent architecture of the VxBlock

platform has the potential to deliver upon both existing, emerging, and as-yet undefined

use cases.

Architectural Area

Feature/Functionality

Availability • Multi-Site Management/Control Plane

• Multi-Site Data Plane

• Management Plane Federation and Scale

• Continuous Availability and Disaster Recovery

Manageability and Insight

• Deeper integration with VxBlock Central

• Enhancements with vRNI, vROPS and NSX Intelligence

• Telemetry

Performance and Scale

• Data Plane enhancements (NIC and Compute Blade)

• Edge Cluster Scaling and Bare-Metal

• Multi-Tenancy and Traffic Isolation

• Vscale integration and Enhancements

Extensibility and Interoperability

• Extensibility and Interoperability

• Support for Brownfield Platforms

• Containers and vSphere 7.0

• CMP Integration VMware vCloud Foundation (VCF)

• Hybrid Cloud and Public Cloud Extension

Meeting requirements

Given the key challenges that modern IT organizations face, a non-siloed approach to

meet these requirements is mandatory to reduce TCO and minimize complexity. VMware

NSX-T, together with the persistent architecture of the VxBlock System 1000 platform, is

uniquely positioned to address both existing use cases and the emerging challenges of

the multi-cloud domain. In summary:

• The Challenge of Application Proliferation -- The increase in application volume,

reduced release cycles, and the use of open sourcing tooling and techniques

requires a networking and security system that is agile and responsive: one that

can spin networks up ‘on the fly’ and de-commission, return, and release unused

capacity on demand. Critically, this requires the ability to employ centrally managed

and homogeneous security policies across domains and systems. NSX-T offers the

ability to achieve this outcome.

Conclusion


• The emergence of the Public and Hybrid Cloud Model -- Organizations are

increasingly adopting the hybrid cloud model. Workloads are increasingly mobile

between on-premises infrastructure and the public cloud. IT organizations are

experiencing financial and technical challenges in terms of security, networking,

compliance, and operational TCO. NSX-T has been designed with the challenges

of the multi-cloud in mind. Extending a uniform and homogeneous security and

network policy across private, public and hybrid clouds is a key strength and unique

selling point of NSX-T.

• The Use of Heterogeneous Platforms -- As businesses move towards the multi-

cloud, it follows that they begin to physically place workloads on differing platforms,

such as ESXi, KVM, Azure, and EC2. Although customers may have a limited

influence at this level, they still require a system that provides a uniform networking

and security policy across all endpoints and platforms. This is the key advantage

garnered from de-coupling NSX-T from the underlying compute manager – it is

endpoint agnostic.

• Application Heterogeneity -- Not only are companies increasingly using cloud

native technologies (containers, Kubernetes, PKS, and OpenShift) in parallel with

traditional platforms such as bare-metal and hypervisor based virtual machines

(KVM and ESXi), they are beginning to ‘mix’ and ‘interweave’ these platforms and

technologies at the application layer. This creates a unique security surface and

operational challenge. NSX-T addresses this challenge directly using an agnostic

endpoint approach and increasing support for cloud native and mixed architectures.

Conclusion

Modern IT and the businesses it supports are on an IT Transformation journey.

Depending on vertical and scale, some may be further along that path than others. It is

clear though that a pathway must be charted in order to achieve effective goals. The

VxBlock 1000 system with NSX-T provides the technical excellence and persistent

architecture necessary to underpin and chart a successful outcome.

This vision will continue to deliver increasing performance and scale, enhancements in

terms of multi-site availability, interoperability with cloud management and automation

systems such as VMware Cloud Foundation and vRealize Automation, enhanced

manageability via VxBlock Central (On premises and SaaS) and finally increasing and

tighter extensibility and integration with the cloud.

Conclusion


Figure 9. VxBlock 1000 and NSX-T - an IT foundation for Cloud Enabled Modern Data

Centers

The coupling of platform excellence, functionality, and solution guidance enables

customers to deliver the software defined architectures that the Hybrid Cloud and Modern

Data Center demand. These architectures are deterministic and predictable for meeting

the needs of existing and emerging use cases, yet flexible enough to satisfy the

requirements of the rapidly evolving multi-cloud landscape and use cases not yet defined.

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