News

VMware Updates SDN-Based NSX-T Platform for Containers, Cloud, Microservices

• By David Ramel
• 12/08/2017

To accommodate emerging application architectures, VMware this week updated its NSX-T platform, based on software-defined networking (SDN) technologies.

NSX-T itself is an update of the company's original SDN offering, just called NSX, that it debuted several years ago after its acquisition of Nicira. NSX-T, the company said, extends the platform's functionality to multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud environments. "NSX-T is a platform that provides network and security virtualization for a plethora of compute nodes such as ESXi, KVM, Bare Metal, public clouds and containers," its documentation says.

That idea of supporting more application frameworks and architectures is furthered in the new NSX-T 2.1 update as newer alternatives such as container-based workloads and microservices become mainstream.

Noting that these movements provide benefits such making developers and app lifecycles more productive, agile and responsive to business needs, VMware said NSX-T 2.1 will enable the same advanced networking and security that it provides for traditional 3-tier apps across these emerging app architectures.

Reflecting the timing of the announcement during the SpringOne Platform developer conference held by Pivotal Software (which itself was spun out of EMC and VMware some five years ago), the new product comes with Pivotal functionality baked in.

"NSX-T 2.1 will serve as the networking and security platform for the recently announced VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS), a Kubernetes solution jointly developed by VMware and Pivotal in collaboration with Google," the company's Scott Goodman said in a blog post this week. "NSX-T 2.1 will also introduce integration with the latest 2.0 release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), serving as the networking and security engine behind PCF. In these environments, NSX-T will provide Layer 3 container networking and advanced networking services such as load balancing, micro-segmentation, and more."

NSX-T 2.1 is expected to be generally available in the next few months.