VMware Launches Upgraded Virtual Networking Software

In order to cater to the fast pace of application development, network vendors are evolving the software that automatically configures and manages network devices to operate not only in traditional data centers but also in a cloud environment.

But cloud environments, particularly the ones using application containers, present their own sets of challenges, not least because application containers, used to package applications into modular components, have very short life spans. Compared with virtual machines, which can live indefinitely, application containers sometimes run for only a few seconds at a time. A micro-service based application can use a large number of containers and a single virtual machine can have tens of containers running at the same time.

This creates a still more pressing need for automation.
Cloud Services Providers Raw HTML ModuleMany container runtime platforms such as Docker, Pivotal’s CF, Red Hat’s OpenShift and even the open source Kubernetes software include basic inter-container network functionality. However, the new NSX-T upgrade from virtualization expert VMware takes things one step further. The new NSX-T 2.1 makes it easier to manage containers at scale and integrate them with other network services such as firewalls and load balancers. Unlike NSX, VMware’s original version of software-defining networking software which works with the company’s vSphere virtualization and ESXi compute hypervisor, the NSX-T version supports hypervisors other than ESXi such as the Kernel Virtual Machine for Linux-powered systems. Basically, it works in public and private cloud environments.

The updated NSX-T 2.1 is designed to improve the use of vSphere in hybrid clouds. It supports the recently-launched Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry platform-as- a-service, a container-centric application development platform. It also allows advanced networking and security for Cloud Foundry’s new Pivotal Container Service, which was jointly developed by VMware, Pivotal and Google.

NSX-T 2.1 will be available in the fourth quarter VMware’s fiscal year 2018.