Introduction to Network Virtualisation with NSX

Thomas Kraus
Eric Lopez

Straw poll of audience asking what type of cloud infrastructure is in place.  No VCD users in the room, but a few using OpenStack.

Service providers (internal or external) want to:
- deploy applications at scale with little pre-planning
- have mobility to move workloads across geographies and providers
- flexibility to create and add L3 - L7 services

Currently VMs are linked to physical network features such as ACLs, IP addresses, VLANs etc.  This means it is slow to make changes, placement of workloads is limited, there are hardware dependencies, operationally intensive and therefore expensive.

Treat NSX as though it is a network hypervisor equivalent to ESX - it places an abstraction layer between VMs and the physical network switches underneath.  Brings hardware independence, allows VMs to be moved around without changing the underlying physical host network config and brings the operational benefits of virtualisation.

In and NSX network every host server only has 1 IP and 1 MAC address per server.

The NSX controller planer is an HA cluster on x86 servers and is out of the data path.  Controls "thousands" of devices - but this was not quantified.

The NSX data plane is based on software switching in the host servers - vSwitch for VMware (NVS) and Open vSwitch for CloudStack and OpenStack (OVS).  Every host in the NSX environment needs a vSwitch of the correct flavour and works with vSphere, KVM and XenServer hypervisors.

NSX manager is a vAppliance

Physical servers are connected through an host running Open vSwitch NSX Gateway

NSX is a tunnelling overlay using STT, GRE and VXLAN.  It effectively adds another layer of L2 headers to each packet.  Jumbo frames are required.

Opening General Session

Main message is IT as a Service and serving the Global workforce.
More interestingly, compared to the messaging when VCD was released VMware's messaging has changed from multiple VMware clouds to just managing multiple clouds (but this isn't reflected in the creation of VMware Hybrid Cloud Services).

Sanjay Poonan on EUC
Claiming that VMware will reduce TCO.
VMware acquires Desktone to and portal management layer - mainly targetting service providers offering DaaS
Software Defined Data Center
Vitualize everything, not just servers
Automate processes
Compatible Hybrid Cloud
Bring program ability and policy-based approach to all of IT
Align storage to apps requirements
Virtualize network for agility and speed

CEO AtoS Thierry Breton
AtoS have adopted the SDDC
Manage largest number of DCs in EU
Intend to eradicate internal emails
Focus is now moving from cost reduction to value add in as and data. Infrastructure should just be a given.
Big Data will form a key part of value add.
TB now a member of EU Cloud advisory group helping Europe to bring standards to cloud services.

vsphere 5.5
More of everything - cores, memory, storage
GA at the end of this week
Leader in delivery of cloud foundry
Emphasising apps moving to scale out with less dependency on infrastructure resilience.
Software Defined Storage
VSAN distributed shared storage across servers for resilience and performance, simple mgmt
New backup capability - vshphere data protection advanced 5.5 much more compression and quicker recovery
Flash cache now available. Virt so now included in 5.5 functionality

Network
Programmatic provisioning
NSX released to GA today
Martine Casado VMware Networking
Networking follows compute
Equivalent to ESX on the network