VMware NSX

VMware NSX is a network virtualization and security platform that enables VMware’s cloud networking solution with a software-defined approach to networking that extends across data centers, clouds and application frameworks. With NSX, networking and security are brought closer to the application wherever it’s running, from virtual machines (VMs) to containers to physical servers.


Like the operational model of VMs, networks can be provisioned and managed independent of underlying hardware. NSX reproduces the entire network model in software, enabling any network topology—from simple to complex multitier networks—to be created and provisioned in seconds. Users can create multiple virtual networks with diverse requirements, leveraging a combination of the services offered via NSX or from a broad ecosystem of third-party integrations—ranging from next-generation firewalls to performance management solutions—to build inherently more agile and secure environments. These services can then be extended to a variety of endpoints within and across clouds.

VMware NSX delivers a operational model for networking defined in software, forming the foundation of the software-defined data center (SDDC) and extending to a cloud network. Data center operators can now achieve levels of agility, security and economics that were previously unreachable when the data center network was tied solely to physical hardware components. NSX provides a complete set of logical networking and security capabilities and services, including logical switching, routing, firewalling, load balancing, virtual private network (VPN), quality of service (QoS), and monitoring. These services are provisioned in virtual networks through any cloud management platform leveraging NSX APIs. Virtual networks are deployed non-disruptively over any existing networking hardware and can extend across data centers, public and private clouds, container platforms, and physical servers.

Key features

• Switching Enable logical Layer 2 overlay extensions across a routed (Layer 3) fabric within and across data center boundaries.
• Routing Dynamic routing between virtual networks that is performed in a distributed manner in the hypervisor kernel, and scale-out routing with active-active failover with physical routers.
• Static routing and dynamic routing protocols are supported, including support for IPv6.
• Load balancing - VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer™ provides enterprisegrade multi-cloud load balancing, global server load balancing (GSLB), application security and web application firewall, application analytics and container ingress services from the data center to the cloud.
• Virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) Complete data plane isolation among tenants with a separate routing table, network address translation (NAT), and edge firewall support in each VRF on the NSX Tier-0 gateway.
• Distributed firewall - Stateful firewalling of Layer 2 up to Layer 7 (including app identification, user identification, and distributed FQDN allowlisting) is embedded in the hypervisor kernel, and distributed across the entire environment with centralized policy and management. In addition, the NSX Distributed Firewall™ integrates directly into cloud native platforms such as Kubernetes and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, native public clouds such as AWS and Azure, as well as physical servers.