I had the opportunity to watch VMware’s presentation on HSX+ at Tech Field Day Extra at VMware Explore 2023. Here are my thoughts on the evolution of this product.
First, let’s pump the brakes for a second and venture back to the basics before we dive headfirst into the realm of NSX Plus. Where ESX virtualizes compute, NSX virtualizes the network It’s like the Swiss Army knife of networking, coming packed with a multitude of services all bundled in a neat software package.
It started with the staples of switching, routing, and distributed firewalls, laying a solid groundwork. They then added a number of capabilities over time to the NSX stack, like the ability to connect, secure, and physical hardware and containers. They also added multi-site (DR) capabilities, allowing you to manage them from one place.
They also added the NSX application platform that allows its customers to see what’s going in their networks.
In order to allow customers to manage and secure multiple networks that may be running in multiple different clouds, VMware has launched NSX+ with five services, the first of which is policy management, which will allow them to manage multiple locations from the cloud. NSX plus intelligence will allow customers to do flow visualization and policy recommendations across those locations. The third service is network detection and response, which will allow customers to triage the threats across different intrusion detection prevention systems (IDPS) events happening in their network. To this VMware will add a load balancing service, which will orchestrate other load balancers. Finally, there is the migration service, which will allow customers to move workloads from one location to another.
NSX plus policy management is generally available today, and the other services are available as free trials. Today it is able to manage ESX workloads in multiple clouds, but it is designed to eventually be able to also manage native workloads.
VMware sees customers wanting multi-cloud setups and plans to stand in the middle orchestrating everything. Sounds like a plan.
Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data
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