Book Image

VMware NSX Network Essentials

By : sreejith c
Book Image

VMware NSX Network Essentials

By: sreejith c

Overview of this book

VMware NSX is at the forefront of the software-defined networking revolution. It makes it even easier for organizations to unlock the full benefits of a software-defined data center – scalability, flexibility – while adding in vital security and automation features to keep any sysadmin happy. Software alone won’t power your business – with NSX you can use it more effectively than ever before, optimizing your resources and reducing costs. Getting started should be easy – this guide makes sure it is. It takes you through the core components of NSX, demonstrating how to set it up, customize it within your current network architecture. You’ll learn the principles of effective design, as well as some things you may need to take into consideration when you’re creating your virtual networks. We’ll also show you how to construct and maintain virtual networks, and how to deal with any tricky situations and failures. By the end, you’ll be confident you can deliver, scale and secure an exemplary virtualized network with NSX.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
VMware NSX Network Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Introducing network planes


In a traditional switch/router, routing and packet forwarding is ideally done on the same device. What does this mean? Let's take a classic example of configuring a router. We might configure SSH for managing the router and later configure routing protocols to exchange the routes with its neighbors. All these common tasks are done specifically on the same hardware device. So, in a nutshell, each and every router will take a forwarding decision based on the configuration of routers. The power of software-defined networking is decoupling the forwarding and control plane functionality to a centralized device called a controller and the end result is the controller maintaining the forwarding information and taking decisions rather than going via hop by hop in the traditional way. As shown in the following figure, the three functional planes of a network are the management plane, the control plane, and the data plane:

The three functional planes of a network are explained...