VMware doesn't appear to have anything earth-shattering to announce around NSX at this week's VMworld. That's OK — whether VMware might acquire parent company EMC is the topic that's probably on more attendees' minds — but VMware does have a few signs of progress to announce today for the network virtualization software.

We already know NSX has more than 700 paying customers, as VMware noted in its second-quarter earnings call. The company is now adding some detail: More than 100 NSX network deployments are in production, and more than 65 customers that have invested more than $1 million each on NSX, says Chris King, VMware's vice president of product marketing.

The customer roster represents "pretty much the gamut of verticals," King says.

And a few more of those customers have now been named. In a Bloomberg story published Sunday, VMware noted that DirecTV used NSX for "networking and security" during the Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.

Other NSX customers cited by Bloomberg include MIT, McKesson Corp, and Vodafone — and eBay and Rackspace, which were disclosed by Nicira back before VMware acquired it for $1.26 billion.

Customer traction is a big area for one-upsmanship between VMware's NSX and Cisco's Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI). The products don't actually do the same things — it's possible to use them together, in fact — but the two architectures seem to frequently square off when customers start thinking about software-defined networking (SDN).

Separately, VMware has already released version 6.2 of the NSX software, although the formal announcement is slated for Monday morning. It already got a rather "meh" response from The Register for lacking any blockbuster features.

But the features are in there. Version 6.2 adds 20 of them. One example: Open vSwitch database (OVDSB) support for NSX in vSphere environments, a feature aimed at better linking NSX to the physical network, especially the top-of-rack switch, King says.

VMware is also adding cross-center vMotion, which means one NSX instance can now span multiple data centers.