Skip to main content

VMware NSX: An introduction

After server and desktop virtualization, VMware is now focusing on network virtualization. Essentially the company has been focusing so far on the 'compute' market for Virtualization and now it has started working on a similar product for Network.

Lets admit it, Networks take more time to provision. With virtualization coming in, the creation of Servers, desktops etc now takes minutes when compared to hours/days/weeks situation in the pre-virtualization era. But if we have a new network requirement for the VMs, it can be sorted to an extend using vSwitch. What if the requirement goes beyond that? Say a router /firewall/VPN that should be used by the VM. Of course, we should get in touch with the networking guys and it could take some time for the stuff to get sorted out

With NSX, Vmware aims to address this bottle neck. The idea is to provision,backup and manage networks similar to how you manage your VMs now. There will be logical switches,routers, firewalls and VPNs.You can create virtual networks using these logical devices, connect your VMs to them , backup your network topology,create templates and deploy on demand. Your underlying physical network will act as the "packet forwarding backplane" as per VMware.

Interesting concept actually!! Would love to see how this gets implemented in real world . Vmware is yet to come up with details of this, and it has already tied up with various partners like Dell,HP,Juniper networks etc to make this a reality. So the key is to wait and watch :)


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Install nested KVM in VMware ESXi 5.1

In this blog, I will explain the steps required to run a nested KVM hypervisor on  Vmware ESXi. The installation of KVM is done on Ubuntu 13.10(64 bit). Note: It is assumed that you have already installed your Ubuntu 13.10 VM in ESXi, and hence we will not look into the Ubuntu installation part. 1) Upgrade VM Hardware version to 9. In my ESXi server, the default VM hardware version was 8. So I had to shutdown my VM and upgrade the Hardware version to 9 to get the KVM hypervisor working. You can right click the VM and select the Upgrade hardware option to do this. 2)In the ESXi host In /etc/vmware edit the 'config' file and add the following setting vhv.enable = "TRUE" 3)Edit the VM settings and go to VM settings > Options  > CPU/MMU Virtualization . Select the Intel EPT option 4) Go to Options->CPUID mask> Advanced-> Level 1, add the following CPU mask level ECX  ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- --H- ---- 5) Open the vmx...

Virtual fibre channel in Hyper V

Virtual fibre channel option in Hyper V allows the connection to pass through from physical  fibre channel HBA to virtual fibre channel HBA, and still have the flexibilities like live migration. Pre-requisites: VM should be running Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 Supported physical HBA with N_Port Virtualization(NPIV) enabled in the HBA. This can be enabled using any management utility provided by the SAN manufacturer. If you need to enable live migration, each host should be having two physical HBAs and each HBA should have two World Wide Names(WWN). WWN is used to established connectivity to FC storage.When you perform migration, the second node can use the second WWN to connect to the storage and then the first node can release its connection. Thereby the storage connectivity is maintained during live migration Configuring virtual fibre channel is a two step process Step 1: Create a Virtual SAN in the Hyper-V host First you need to click on Vir...

Windows server 2012: where is my start button??

If you have been using Windows Server OS for a while, the one thing that will strike you most when you login to a Windows server 2012 is that there is no start button!!.. What??..How am I going to manage it?? Microsoft feels that you really dont need a start button, since you can do almost everything from your server  manager or even remotely from your desktop. After all the initial configurations are done, you could also do away with the GUI and go back to server core option.(In server 2012, there is an option to add and remove GUI). So does that mean, you need to learn to live without a start button. Actually no, the start button is very much there .Lets start looking for it. Option 1: There is "charms" bar on the side of your deskop, where you will find a "start" option. You can use the "Windows +C" shortcut to pop out the charms bar Option 2: There is a hidden "start area"in  the bottom left corner of your desktop...