The latest version of the Apstra Operating System (AOS), announced today, adds interoperability between the underlying physical network and software-defined overlay networks including VMware NSX.

Apstra also revealed another customer — Chevron — that is using AOS and VMware software.

“Apstra and VMware are enabling businesses to drive cloud-scale availability, resiliency, and efficiencies in private data centers while maintaining unified policy across these data centers and the public cloud,” said Ken Brooks, lead network architect at Chevron, in a statement.

Apstra, a leader in intent-based networking, already integrated with VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform. “But the next step was always an integration with NSX, and now we’re there,” said Apstra CEO and founder Mansour Karam. With AOS 3.1, Apstra adds automation to ensure consistent network and security policies for workloads across physical and virtual NSX infrastructure. It also automates these consistent policies across any workload and any cloud. “And we do this across all the hardware vendors they support,” Karam added.

As with the earlier releases, AOS 3.1 is hardware agnostic and integrated with several networking hardware and operating system vendors including Cisco, Arista, Juniper Networks, and Dell EMC, among others.

Businesses can scale deployments across thousands of physical and virtual switches with no performance impact, the company says. It’s also adding Cumulus Networks’ open network operating system support with this release.

By correlating traffic traversing physical infrastructure and NSX environments, the updated Apstra software enables faster root-cause analysis and anomaly correlation, the vendor says. And additional automation capabilities include continuous validation of policies defined by NSX, which aims to eliminate manual troubleshooting.

All of this leads to reduced operational cost — Apstra claims its intent-based networking software cuts these costs by 83% — and faster mean time to resolution by 70%.

AOS 3.1 will be generally available in September.