August 27, 2019 / By VMware PR
Chris Wolf, Vice President & CTO, Global Field and Industry, VMware
When managing applications and data in a multi-cloud world, there is no more important architectural decision than the network. We learn early in our IT careers that if users can’t access an application, “just blame DNS!”
All fun aside, the decisions about how to architect and operate networks have a major impact on:
When you factor in the accelerated pace of app and service deployments — and an increasingly dynamic security threat landscape — network agility is more critical than ever.
This is why VMware continues to advance our Virtual Cloud Network vision - a fully software-defined networking fabric that spans clouds, data centers, and edge — the must-have architecture design for our multi-cloud world.
Today’s VMworld news advances our Virtual Cloud Network vision. Here are the big-ticket innovations:
NSX Intelligence is a new distributed analytics engine built natively into VMware NSX-T. The solution provides continuous, data center-wide visibility for network and application security teams. NSX Intelligence is intrinsic to the network fabric.
Here are three important technical differentiators:
1. Native Security
NSX Intelligence is built into the hypervisor, simplifying operational management. It also provides a distributed analytics architecture far more difficult to attack or subvert than traditional taps.
2. Distributed Analytics to Each Host
The distributed analytics model offers massive inline processing capacity with lower costs and latency. This approach helps eliminate traffic duplication, network degradation, or the need for a parallel analytics network.
3. Comprehensive Analysis
With NSX Intelligence, you can inspect every packet from every workload without sampling, all while converging multiple security controls into a single platform. This, in turn, helps eliminate security blind spots and accelerates security incident remediation.
In the initial release, we expect organizations to use NSX Intelligence to address the following primary use cases:
NSX Intelligence is a transformative solution. To learn more and dive deeper into the technology, visit https://www.vmware.com/go/networking-security-stack.
The new VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (previously Avi Networks Platform) is a distributed application delivery controller (ADC). It’s purpose-built to scale and run anywhere — from the cloud to the data center to the edge.
Using one centralized interface, customers can dispatch services like load balancing and intelligent web application firewall (iWAF) to any application on any cloud running on virtual machines, containers, or bare metal.
In essence, your ADC can be literally anywhere your applications run, now and in the future.
To learn more about NSX Advanced Load Balancer, see this blog post.
vRealize Network Insight and NSX Intelligence work together to deliver comprehensive visibility, analytics, and troubleshooting to improve Virtual Cloud Network operations.
The latest release of vRealize Network Insight provides visibility and troubleshooting for physical and virtual infrastructure stretching from the data center to the network edge, with new support for:
vRealize Network Insight 5.0 enhances NSX operations management by extending the PCI Compliance Dashboard for NSX-T. It also detects audit changes for firewall rules and tracks Virtual Tunnel Endpoint (VTEP) latencies.
NSX-T is the industry’s only network and security platform delivered completely in software. New enhancements to NSX-T include:
For more information on NSX-T 2.5 enhancements, see “NSX-T 2.5: A New Marker on the Innovation Timeline.”
We are excited to welcome Uhana into the VMware family. Uhana built a real-time deep learning engine that optimizes the telco network experience. Key emerging and vertical use cases, include:
We see three primary functions for our customers:
For more information, see “VMware To Add Uhana to Telecommunications Portfolio, Harnessing the Power of AI for Mobile Networks.”
With Kubernetes support in OpenStack, communication service providers finally have a cloud native platform for container-based applications and services.
We’ve also added some other significant features to OpenStack, including:
As you can see, our Virtual Cloud Network vision is stronger than ever.
Perhaps begin with a new Kubernetes initiative. Or build institutional knowledge by using our architecture with a small number of applications. Then, start to scale as your team’s comfort with the technology improves.
Make no mistake: This is a fundamental shift in how we architect and manage networks and security.
It’s not just VMware’s vision. It’s an industry inevitability, with major hyperscalers taking a similar, modern, purpose-built architectural approach. The primary difference with our approach is that we are multi-cloud and multi-data center by design.
Together, we can fundamentally transform networking to be more agile, intelligent, secure, and resilient than ever.
Dive deeper into all of today’s VMworld US news and announcements.