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

Overlay networks


A virtual network which is built on top of a physical network is called an overlay network. Does that sound familiar by any chance? Most enterprise environments would have used VPN technology for securing private or public networks, which is an IP-over-IP overlay technology. However, it is very important to understand that not all overlay networks are built on top of IP networks. The real question is, why do we require an overlay network ? As we can see from the following figure, we have two data centers and each of these data centers is following a spine-leaf topology. Flexible workload placement and virtual machine mobility, along with strong multitenancy for each tenant, are common asks in a virtualized infrastructure:

VXLAN, MPLS, NVGRE, VPN, and OTV are some of the classic examples of network-based overlays. Let's go back to the roots of server virtualization. Server virtualization virtualizes a physical server and allows multiple virtual machines to run on top of...