In May last year, VMware acquired Nicira a company specialized in software defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization. Now VMware has announced that the Nicira NVP and VMware vCloud Network and Security (vCNS) will become one unified platform naming it VMware NSX.
VMware NSX exposes a complete suite of simplified logical networking elements and services including logical switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPN, QoS, monitoring, and security; arranged in any topology with isolation and multi-tenancy through programmable APIs – deployed on top of any physical IP network fabric, resident with any compute hypervisor, connecting to any external network, and consumed by any cloud management platform (e.g. vCloud, OpenStack, CloudStack).
The VMware NSX platform consists of the following components:
- Controller Cluster, a highly available scale-out distributed system of x86 machines responsible for the programmatic deployment of virtual networks across the entire architecture
- Hypervisor vSwitches, a a high performance in-kernel vSwitch with a programmable L2-L4 data plane and configuration database.
- Gateways, providing scale-out Gateway services that connect virtual networks within VMware NSX to non-virtual hosts, remote sites, and external networks.
- Ecosystem partners which can attach L4-L7 service appliances to VMware NSX to be exposed as services available to virtual networks.
- NSX Manager a web-based GUI management dashboard for user friendly human interaction with the VMware NSX controller cluster API, for system setup, administration and troubleshooting.