VMware towards NGN : NSX-V and NSX-T differences
VMware towards NGN : NSX-V and NSX-T differences
Today We are going to talk about VMWare NSX-V and NSX-T. We are also going to talk about what the difference between these two. Let's start with the VMware NSX-V which was originally software-defined networking solution based on the acquisition of Nicira by VMware back in 2012.VMware NSX solution was called NSX-V that delivers virtualized networking and security entirely in software.
In our past article, we talked about the VMware NSX feature components, as we discuss about the VMware NSX now then what this new term VMware NSX-T is ?
NSX-T which is termed as Transformers is the next-generation software-defined networking solution that provides the next evolution of software-defined networking from VMware. So you can say that VMware NSX-T is the enhanced version of NSX-V ?
May or may not be as NSX-T comes into the picture where we saw some of the use cases which is not covered by NSX-V which are multi-hypervisors, cloud, containers and bare metal servers.
 |
| Fig 1.1- NSX-V and NSX-T |
So that is not covered in VMware NSX-V and now it is covered under NSX-T which means that NSX-T is a much more viable offering than NSX-V in the hybrid cloud and cloud-only deployment models which is more demanding as per the current infrastructure requirement.
NSX-V supports vSphere only which means NSX-V solution requires a vCenter Server in the environment. NSX-V relies so heavily on vCenter Server is the requirement for vSphere Distributed Switches (VDS), which are required by NSX-V services. The VDS is only available if you have vCenter Server in the environment.
Additional Topics to study
While NSX-T supports both vSphere and KVM as hypervisors and also integrates with Kubernetes and Open Shift for containerized workloads. This is a huge shift when moving towards the non-VMware hypervisors.
So in short, NSX-T contains support for different hypervisors and environments. NSX-T focuses on supporting cloud-native applications, bare metal workloads, multi-hypervisor environments, public clouds and multi-cloud environments.
NSX-T is supported on ESXi, KVM, bare-metal servers, Kubernetes, Open Shift, AWS and Azure.
Let's talk about other difference, NSX-V uses VXLAN network encapsulation to create the network overlay needed to create virtual networks. I will not talk about VXLAN here, as we will discuss that in another article to guide you with the VXLAN and the how to use that.
NSX-T is not using VXLAN, while NSX-T uses another protocol called GENEVE (Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation).
In short if we would like to say VMware pushes customers to move from NSX-V to NSX-T, NSX-T is the new way forward for NSX virtualization. For NSX-T deployments you need to required vCenter Server and provides options that span beyond vSphere and into other hypervisors, even into the Cloud.
