VMware updates networking and security portfolio

August 27, 2019 TH Author

Day two of VMworld in San Francisco has started with announcements centred on VMware’s networking and security portfolio, backing the company’s Virtual Cloud Network vision.

Tuesday’s announcement includes the introduction of VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer; enhanced network and security analytics capabilities, delivered through VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and NSX Intelligence; and advancements of VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud.

VMware said the solutions collectively enable it to deliver the public cloud experience across any infrastructure, spanning edge to private data centres, to public clouds.

“VMware brings the one-click public cloud experience to the entire enterprise through an automated, software-defined network architecture,” senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s networking and security business unit Tom Gillis said.

The new VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer comes by way of the Avi Networks acquisition the company undertook in June.

Previously known as the Avi Networks Platform, the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer is a distributed application delivery controller (ADC) built for the cloud, with an architecture that mirrors cloud principles.

The company has touted that the new offering will help organisations — through modern, software-defined application delivery services — to overcome a lot of the problems that arise when dealing with legacy tech.

Specifically, NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides a software load balancer and intelligent web application firewall, and boasts advanced analytics and monitoring that VMware said enables a fast, scalable, and more secure application experience.

NSX Intelligence, a new distributed analytics engine built natively into NSX-T, has been detailed by the company as providing continuous data centre-wide visibility for network and application security teams.

Speaking with media on the importance of integrating NSX intelligence, Chris Wolf CTO, Global Field and Industry at VMware said NSX Intelligence helps eliminate blind spots to reduce security risk.

“This is really important and really transformative technology because if you think about how we’re doing network monitoring today … it creates a lot of challenges … and the fact that I’m just doing periodic sampling means that i’m not actually having full observatibility of all my traffic flows, with NSX intelligence, we’re actually baking these analytics in a distributed fashion — some of your analytics are running across every server in your environment.,” Wolf explained.

“We’re able to actually capture 100% of the flows, we can do some automation based on that, we can automate the rollout of your micro segments and your firewall rules. Through this platform, we can allow our network and operations folks, and our security folks, to be able to isolate problems and troubleshoot problems using a single console and a single set of visibility.”

NXS Advanced Load Balancer is the rebranding and relaunch of the software that VMware acquired from Avi Networks.

Offering some statistics, the company said the VMware virtual cloud networking is now deployed by 13,000 customers, which includes 88 of the Fortune 100, and eight of the top 10 Telcos. Additionally, it reached more than 150,000 branch offices via VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud.

VMware scooped up VeloCloud in late 2017.

Also announced on Tuesday was VMware NSX-T, touted as the industry’s only network and security platform delivered completely in software. VMware said it covers the full range of L2-L7 services for workloads running on all types of infrastructure, including virtual machines, containers, physical servers, and both private and public clouds.

Disclosure: Asha Barbaschow travelled as a guest of VMware to VMworld in San Francisco.

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