This book aims to be useful for both new and seasoned VMware NSX for vSphere administrators. It is intended to be used by those that have never deployed NSX and by those that have it deployed already but are looking to leverage newer or advanced functionality. Intermediate networking and virtualization knowledge is assumed and is essential to understanding deployment of NSX into your environment.

Before we begin serving the main recipes of our cookbook, we will first provide an overview of what VMware NSX for vSphere is and what functionality it provides over traditional networking models.

VMware NSX for vSphere is a core component of the VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC); it is the component that enables network virtualization. Network virtualization provides a layer of abstraction over the physical network using a VXLAN network overlay. With NSX, network operations are now independent of the physical hardware, and functions such as logical firewalls, load balancers, logical routers, logical switches, and virtual private networks can be provisioned, modified, or torn down as part of an automated workflow.