VMware today said it now has more than 15,000 Virtual Cloud Network customers, including 89 of the Fortune 100 and eight of the top 10 telecommunication operators. Specific to SD-WAN, which is one piece of the virtual networking stack, more than 225,000 branch offices have deployed VMware’s SD-WAN, said Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit. “We are the No. 1 vendor in SD-WAN,” Gillis said.

VMware bases this claim on IHS Markit’s fourth-quarter 2019 SD-WAN market report, Frost and Sullivan’s 2019 data, and Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.

This is the first time that VMware has disclosed something akin to an SD-WAN customer count.

“Now for 20 years, there’s been another big networking company down on Tasman Drive that has absolutely dominated branch office — like 70, 80% market share,” Gillis continued. He didn’t name the competitor, but he’s talking about Cisco, which has a campus on Tasman Drive in San Jose, California. VMware and Cisco have consistently jockeyed for the top SD-WAN vendor title since purchasing VeloCloud and Viptela, respectively. And as of its first fiscal quarter of 2020, Cisco claimed 20,000 SD-WAN customers.

“All of a sudden we’re No. 1,” Gillis said. “How did this happen? I think because of the power of virtualization.”

Then he threw down the gauntlet on all IT infrastructure. “We are actively looking at and exploring those same opportunities in all aspects of infrastructure. No specific plan, no specific intention, but where there’s infrastructure that can be simplified, VMware will be there, and virtualization is the answer.”

In addition to announcing customer counts — VMware says its Virtual Cloud Network customers have grown on average 50% each fiscal year since May 2018 — the vendor also rolled out networking updates.

Virtual Cloud Network Updates

As the name suggests, Virtual Cloud Network is the networking component of VMware Cloud Foundation, which is the vendor’s full software stack that bundles compute, networking, and storage. It can be deployed on premises as a private cloud or it can run in all of the major public clouds: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud.

One of the networking tools within the Virtual Cloud Network platform is VMware's vRealize Network Insight Updates. And today VMware said vRNI (pronounced “Vernie”) now provides end-to-end network visibility and analytics to optimize network performance and troubleshoot the entire networking infrastructure. This includes the virtual overlay and physical underlay, and it spans data centers, multi-cloud environments, and branch locations.

New flow-based application discovery uses machine learning (ML) and application labelling algorithms to discover application and tier boundaries. “This specifically addresses that we can draw you a picture of the flows and then feed it into NSX to create rules” around microsegmentation and security recommendations for their data center workloads,” Gillis said.

Additionally, vRealize Network Insight also now supports AWS Direct Connect and VMware SD-WAN application and business policy statistics, and it includes additional Kubernetes visibility and support for VMware NSX-T 3.0. “We’ve had a lot of request, folks saying, ‘how can I get visibility into the public cloud? How can I get visibility into AWS? so what we’ve done with vRNI, with this release is to get that path up to the VMware cloud that’s running on AWS,” said Sanjay Uppal, SVP and GM of VMware SD-WAN. “It gives you that end-to-end nature of what’s going on from a visibility and a telemetry stamp.”

VMware SD-WAN, NSX New Features

VMware also added new capabilities to its NSX networking and security platform. NSX-T 3.0 includes a new feature called NSX Federation, which Gillis said provides enterprise customers a public cloud-like operating model within their on-premises data centers. It does this using fault isolation domains — this allows customers to contain any network problems to a single zone, thus minimizing the severity and impact of problems — and global policies synchronized across all locations.

NSX-T 3.0 also extends container networking services including switching, routing, distributed firewall, microsegmentation, and load balancing to the newly released VMware vSphere with Kubernetes and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 platforms, the VMware Tanzu portfolio, and non-VMware Kubernetes platforms.

The latest release also targets operators deploying 5G networks and edge strategies. VMware says NSX-T 3.0 introduces capabilities such as Layer 3 EVPN for virtual machine mobility, multicast routing for scalable networking, and accelerated data plane performance. Additionally, VMware SD-WAN acts as an intelligent overlay in conjunction with 5G’s network sliced underlays, which the vendor says translates to cost-effective, high-performance, application-aware services at the network edge.

Partnering With Microsoft on Azure Edge Zones

VMware is also working with Microsoft on its new Azure Edge Zones, which embed compute, storage, and networking resources at the edge of 5G networks. Azure Edge Zones will allow customer to deploy and run virtual network functions (VNFs) including VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud. The SD-WAN technology integrates with the Azure portal and enables zero-touch provisioning across Azure Edge Zones. These will span private edge zones, located in customers’ on-premises sites, as well as Microsoft-owned locations and Azure Edge Zones in carriers’ facilities.

“All these three are covered within the architecture that is both hardware and software combined, and will have different VNFs that [customers] can put in the architecture, as well as centralized, managed compute,” Uppal said. “We are the SD-WAN fabric that ties these things together.”

Is VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network SASE?

Also on the call with reporters, Gillis and Uppal provided more details about how its Virtual Cloud Network stack, which includes both data center networking and security as well as SD-WAN, relates to secure access service edge (SASE). Gartner coined the term SASE, and it’s a type of architecture that consolidates networking and security capabilities into an edge cloud-delivered service.

The short answer, according to Uppal: Virtual Cloud Network is the best platform for a SASE architecture.

“For us the Virtual Cloud Network is the broader framework where VMware is putting all our effort in the networking space,” Uppal said. “We view SASE as being a particular facet that it’s taking, meaning that network services and network security services coming together in the cloud, as a service, being provided by the same vendor. Then that allows you to have cloud-based services that can be consumed on the fly.”

He said VMware’s gateways — 130 points of presence across telco and colocation facilities as well as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) — give it a SASE advantage. “This is the best platform because we see the packet first,” Uppal said. “From there, we can securely steer it to any cloud service, we can steer it to services that are running on the gateways themselves, we can steer it to third-party services that do compute. And this all fits as one incarnation of the Virtual Cloud Network.”