LAS VEGAS — VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform now runs on Microsoft Azure. And for those that doubted the technology really is the secret sauce behind everything VMware does as CEO Pat Gelsinger has said in the past, during his Dell Technologies World keynote he detailed the company’s “vision for the future of networking.” That future looks like NSX.

NSX already enabled consistent networking and security across private vSphere-based data centers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and IBM Cloud. In addition to new Microsoft Azure support, VMware announced updates to NSX so that enterprises can use it to move workloads between clouds, on-premises data centers, and edge locations, and manage applications across a hybrid cloud environment.

And this, Gelsinger said, is essentially the future of networking. “It’s programable and flexible to support the needs of a digital business, built for infinite scale but no longer limited by box or boundaries, with intrinsic security, consumed as a service,” he said. “Above all, it’s software-driven and enables consistency and elasticity. This is what we call the virtual cloud network.”

VMware is also renaming some of its networking and security products. The following products now comprise the NSX portfolio:

  • NSX Data Center, or the product formerly known as NSX. It now supports containerized cloud-native and bare metal applications.
  • NSX Cloud, which is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. When it launched at last year’s VMworld, it initially supported vSphere-private clouds, native Amazon Web Services (AWS) workloads, and VMware Cloud on AWS. It now runs on Microsoft Azure, too.
  • NSX SD-WAN, which includes the software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) technology VMware acquired when it bought VeloCloud last year. With the update, NSX SD-WAN integrates with NSX Data Center and NSX Cloud. “Coming under this one NSX brand, we have extended VeloCloud into the data center so you can segment your traffic from the branch all the way up to the cloud and also into the data center,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, COO of products and cloud services at VMware.
  • NSX Hybrid Connect provides cloud migration capabilities and consistent networking across a hybrid cloud environment. Customer can use this tool to migrate workloads from any VMware environment to another software-defined data center running on premises, in the public cloud, or operated by a VMware cloud provider partner.
Telco Adoption

“We’re also seeing this vision being rapidly embraced by telco service providers,” Gelsinger said, bringing two of its operator customers, Swisscom and Telstra, on stage during his keynote.

Swisscom is the largest telco in Switzerland, said Stephan Massalt, VP of cloud labs at Swissscom. It teamed up with VMware in December to launch its enterprise service cloud, which uses vRealize for management infrastructure and application services, NSX for networking and security, and vSphere for compute, running on Dell EMC hardware.

Australian operator Telstra was already using VeloCloud’s SD-WAN before VMware acquired it. “NSX SD-WAN is a fantastic complement to our strategy,” said Jim Fagan, director global platforms at Telstra. Moving forward, Telstra has some “aggressive adoption” plans for the technology, including using it for interconnection between private and public clouds, Fagan said.