As we discussed in first post of this series that NSX-T was born to meet the demands of the containerized workload, multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud.

The best use case that you can think of NSX-T is that it provides seamless connectivity and security services for all types of endpoints including virtual machines, containers and bare metal. It doesn’t really matter where these endpoints are. It could be in your on-prem datacenter, a remote office or in the cloud.

In this post we will look how NSX-T architecture looks like. 

Like NSX-V, NSX-T too contains a management plane, data plane and a control plane. Lets discuss about each plane individually here.

Data Plane

• NSX-T uses in-kernel modules for ESXi and KVM hypervisors for constructing data plane. 
• Since NSX-T is decoupled from vSphere, it don’t rely on vSphere vSwitch for network connectivity. NSX-T data plane introduces a host switch called N-VDS (NSX Managed Virtual Distributed Switch).

VMware NSX is one of the most sensational products that VMware produced 5 years ago, after the Niciria acquisition, and over the years, this product has just gotten better and better. NSX revolutionized the SDDC by adding SDN capabilities and changing the way SDN was used before NSX. 

One of the major limitations of NSX-V was that it could be used only with vSphere and not with other platforms, and customers were continuously demanding a version of NSX that could be integrated with non-vSphere platforms.

To overcome this challenge, VMware came up with NSX-T, which is a version of NSX that supports both vSphere and non-vSphere-based infrastructure. This version of NSX can be integrated with other hypervisors, such as KVM, and application frameworks, such as Redhat Openshift, Docker/Containers, and Pivotal.

As we know, in NSX-V, vCenter was a centralized management plane, but NSX-T has its own management interface. As of now, NSX-T doesn’t offer the same full feature set as NSX-V, but VMware is continuously making enhancements to this product to make it more robust.… Read More