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With 86% of data centers expected to be virtualized by 2016, IT is making great strides as far as storage and compute are concerned. It is pretty common to provision virtual machines in seconds, provide mobility, move workloads in a live environment, and even add or remove storage from a VM.
VMware Guest Blogger
December 2, 2015
4 Min Read
With 86% of data centers expected to be virtualized by 2016, IT is making great strides as far as storage and compute are concerned. It is pretty common to provision virtual machines in seconds, provide mobility, move workloads in a live environment, and even add or remove storage from a VM.
But, for the majority of networks, there seems to be a delay in becoming completely virtualized. Currently, a network may have a mix of components that are provisioned manually or piecemealed hardware with their own rules and management framework. For cloud service providers whose business depends on providing cloud-based infrastructure and application services to end customers, the inability to automate networking underneath the cloud-based compute resources can be a key blocker to providing the right type of service experience for end customers. As a result, current network models do not provide a complete end-to-end automatic experience for end customers, nor do they address concerns about virtualization inside the host between VMs, including firewall and routing rules.
So, is there a simple way to bring virtualization full circle to our networks?
VMware’s NSX technology can do this. NSX does for network virtualization what vSphere did for compute virtualization. By creating a network model in software as opposed to hardware, NSX enables service providers to create a policy-driven network quickly and systematically from a single pane of glass, without having to change specific rules on each hardware device. In a nutshell, this out-of-the box software can:
Ensure that the firewall rules and policies are automatically distributed throughout the entire data center environment, and that such policies are associated with each VM. That means that when a virtual machine moves, so do networking policies associated with it. No more do service providers have to worry about manually fixing network policies following any changes to the compute infrastructure caused by vMotion (that is, live migration of virtual machines).
Enable service providers and end customers to control communication between virtual machines in a granular manner, whether the two VMs reside on the same or different virtual networks. This is done through a technical capability called micro-segmentation, but we won’t go into that technology here. It is sufficient to note that through this capability, one can put a group of VMs in a group to facilitate communication and traffic between them, and change the members of this group or their hierarchy within software
Free up resource capabilities in expensive network hardware components, allowing service providers to replace them with lower-cost, white label solutions–that is, become hardware-agnostic.
What type of benefits can service providers achieve with NSX?
Operational efficiency: By moving network complexity into software, a service provider can create new networks or manage existing networks lot more efficiently, as opposed to managing each hardware device such as a firewall appliance or a router. This efficiency can not only improve the bottom line, but also improve the response time to end customers, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
Increased revenue: Additional capabilities provided by NSX can enable service providers to develop new revenue streams. For example, using L2 stretching provided by NSX (that is, the ability to stretch a data center network’s edge to the cloud by keeping the IP addresses the same), a service provider can target customers with compliance-heavy workloads–those who are reaching capacity in their current data center but can’t easily move to cloud w/o this capability. Providers can also provide a managed solution to such customers, giving them cloud capacity as well as managing their data center for them, providing additional revenue streams.
Providers can offer many additional services such as managed firewalls or managed VPNs, to end customers, all with the goal of solving customer pain points. This leads to the increased lifetime value of a customer.
So, how can a service provider leverage NSX? We’d love to hear your thoughts below. To learn more about network virtualization and NSX, we invite you to join us on December 2nd and 11th for a two-part VMware Live webinar series, or you can refer to the NSX overview page directly.
Manish Bhuptani is Director of Marketing, Cloud Service Provider Business, at VMware. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.
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