NSX for vSphere 6.3 and NSX-T 1.1 Released

VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3 has been released today and with it comes a host of new bells and whistles:

• vSphere 6.5 Support
• VMware Integrated Containers Support
• Centralised dashboard for Services and Operations
• Faster Upgrades
  • Future NSX Manager upgrades will no longer require a reboot. VMware claim this will mean upgrades are 5 times quicker. How that claim is measured will be tested when NSX 6.3.1 drops!
• Universal Security Tags
  • In previous releases when dealing with a multi-site, multi-vCenter deployment the only options for Dynamic Security Policies for DFW rules were to use either MAC address or IP lists. With this release the concept of universal security tags will allow for dynamic rulesets for the implementation of DFW rules across multiple vCenter/NSX deployments.
• Branch Office
  • To bring NSX to highly dispersed environments beyond the datacenter VMware is introducing a special SKU based on Per VM licencing to fit that model. This is something I’ve been hoping for as a lot of customers don’t have the VM density per host to justify the per socket cost of NSX.
• Increased vCloud Director support
  • As part of the NSX 6.3 release the foundations have been laid for vCloud NFV customers and Service Providers to provide advanced NSX functionality as part of a self-service platform. The list of capabilities to be exposed in vCloud Director has not been released but I’d be surprised if micro-segmentation wasn’t one of these capabilities (only speculation of course as I’m not privy to that information!)
• Integration with vRA 7.2
  • There are now additional enhancements relating to the consumption of NSX load balancers and NAT functionality
• Licencing
  • Announced as part of the press release is that customers who already own valid NSX licences are now entitled to use either NSX for vSphere or NSX-T in their environments (as long as they stay within their licensed limits of course!)
• Customer Base Has Grown
  • VMware NSX finished 2016 with more than 2,400 customers!
• Training and Certification
  • VMware has said that there has been over 11,000 professionals who have attended NSX training and there are now more than 7,000 NSX certified professionals worldwide.

NSX-T 1.1 has a few new features of note:

• VMware Photon Support
• Added supported for vendor KVM platforms, namely Canonical and Red Hat
• Added/Updated support for OpenStack Newton and Mitaka
• New Beta Program for customers looking to network and secure containers
  • If a customer is looking to utilise container frameworks that are part of the Container Network Interface (CNI) project then VMware has a beta program for you! Contact your TAM for more information

Read more, and see some of the changes at the following link