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.
NSX-T, when initially released, offered features such as logical routing, logical switching, micro-segmentation for VMs, and a distributed firewall. But with the latest release of NSX-T, VMware added network virtualization and micro-segmentation for containers.
The latest version of NSX-T is 2.2.0 and to learn more about the capabilities offered by this version, please see the Release Notes
Brandon Lee from Vembu has written an excellent Article on the NSX-V and NSX-T comparison.
Additional Reading
NSX-T: VMware’s Networking Solution for Modern, Multicloud Applications
Hybrid Cloud Networking with VMware NSX-T
That’s it for this post. In the next post of this series, I will discuss NSX-T architecture.