5 New VMware NSX, Dell SDN Products Announced At VMWorld

CRN breaks down the five new NSX, NSX-T and software-defined networking offerings unveiled Tuesday at VMWorld 2019.

VMware And Dell’s New NSX And SDN Offerings

At VMWorld 2019 Tuesday, the virtualization star launched several new NSX offerings and enhancements as well as integrated software-defined networking offerings with Dell EMC.

“Dell EMC and VMware are rebuilding the network for the cloud era—with everything open, automated and software-defined,” said Tom Burns, senior vice president and general manager for Dell EMC’s networking and security business unit. “New SD-WAN solutions powered by VMware and network fabric management delivered by SmartFabric Director raise the stakes when it comes to network virtualization and security in today’s highly distributed software-defined enterprise. We’re just getting started on our combined innovation.”

Here are five new offerings and enhancements launched at VMWorld around NSX and software-defined networking.

SmartFabric Director

Dell and VMware’s new SDN SmartFabric Director enables the physical switch underlay infrastructure to keep pace with the changing demands of virtualized and software-defined networks. Based on Dell PowerSwitch switches, the offering tightly integrates VMware vSphere and NSX-T to correctly provision application workloads.

SmartFabric Director uses a declarative model that allows users to express intent with a set of three fabric types. Fabric discovery is an ongoing process and ensures that the wiring is consistent with the user-defined intent, allowing for rapid auto provisioning. In addition, the offering supports highly scalable and flexible streaming telemetry to gather key operational data and statistics from the fabric switches. The director also automates the download, installation and verification process and ensures that switches are upgraded with the correct images.

SmartFabric Director will become available globally in September.

NSX Intelligence

VMware’s new NSX Intelligence is a distributed analytics engine built natively into NSX-T. The offering provides continuous data-center-wide visibility for network and application security teams to provide more dynamic security, simplify compliance analysis and streamline security operations.

NSX Intelligence provides deep insight at the packet level into virtualized and containerized workloads, allowing for intuitive, highly automated network and security policy generation and enforcement. The new NSX offering helps eliminate blind spots to reduce security risk and accelerate security incident remediation through visualization and deep insight into every flow across the entire data center. Customers can gain holistic context for security troubleshooting and improve collaboration between infrastructure and security teams through a converged pane for security operations.

NSX Advanced Load Balancer

Leveraging technology recently acquired from Avi Networks, VMware’s new NSX Advanced Load Balancer is a distributed application delivery controller (ADC) build for the cloud that mirrors cloud principles. The offering helps organizations overcome the complexity and rigidness of legacy systems and application delivery controllers with software-defined application delivery services.

NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides a software load balancer and intelligent web application firewall, combined with advanced analytics and monitoring to enable a fast, scalable and intrinsically more secure application experience, according to VMware. The offering’s central control plane and distributed data plane deliver application services as a multi-cloud fabric that intelligently automates decisions and provides application analytics and on-demand elasticity. Customers can dispatch services, such as load balancing and web application firewalls, to any application on any cloud, running on VMs, containers or bare metal, using one centralized interface.

NSX-T 2.5

VMware touts NSX-T as the industry’s only network and security platform that is completely delivered in software, offering services for workloads running on all types of infrastructure from VMs and containers to physical servers and private and public clouds.

The new NSX-T 2.5 strengthens the platform’s intrinsic security capabilities and delivers expanded scalability, cloud-native support and operational simplicity. New enhancements to NSX-T include a Native Cloud Enforcement mode that allows customers to increase security of public cloud workloads using native cloud security controls. Another new enhancement is the ability to apply Layer-7 application ID-based or context-aware rules to the NSX edge firewall for north-south traffic, as well as support for Layer-7 application ID-based distributed firewalling in KVM environments. NSX-T 2.5 also includes VPN enhancements for multitenancy as well as packet mirroring for east-west traffic monitoring via Service Insertion.

Dell EMC SD-WAN

Now generally available to sell, Dell EMC SD-WAN combines VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud and Dell EMC managed infrastructure. The offering makes SD-WAN by VeloCloud software available as a flexible subscription with modern appliances in multiple configuration options, backed by Dell support, supply chain and services.

VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud includes a choice of public, private or hybrid cloud network for connection to cloud and enterprise applications; branch office applications and data center appliances; and virtual services delivery. Dell EMC SD-WAN includes cloud-based management and orchestration software services from VMware managed by Dell EMC as well as application-focused access gateways from VMware.