VMware positions NSX for multi-cloud, containerized networking

VMware is well positioned at the intersection of major industry trends, including virtualization, containerization cloud, SDN, hyperconverged infrastructure, application security, and AI, said company CEO Pat Gelsinger, kicking off the annual VMworld conference in Las Vegas and marking the 20th anniversary of the Palo Alto, California based firm. The VMware Vision is to become "the essential, ubiquitous digital foundation for any device, any application, and any cloud.

Gelsinger said NSX, which is its SDN network virtualization and security platform, is now enabling 80 million switch ports installed by over 7,500 customers, including 82% of the Fortune 100 with NSX running in their network. VMware estimates this footprint at 10X its largest competitor. Gelsinger argues that this positions NSX as the best platform to address the complexity, security and scale of multi-cloud corporate environments and for containerized networking. The latest version of NSX extends multi-cloud networking and security capabilities to AWS, in addition to Microsoft Azure and on-premises environments. NSX is adding support for bare metal hosts, in addition to hypervisor and container environments, including Linux-based workloads running on bare-metal servers, as well as containers running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor.

VMware showcased a collaboration with Arista which enables NSX security policies to be enforced natively on Arista switches across a multi-cloud enterprise, extending security policies across both virtual to physical workloads, from mainframes to data center to public clouds. The collaboration also integrates Arista’s Macro-Segmentation Services with VMware NSX micro-segmentation capabilities.

VMware's vSAN, which is a hyper-converged, software-defined storage (SDS) product, is likewise making strong inroads into software-defined data centers. The company claims over 15,000 customers, a 50% presence in Global 2000 enterprises, and a 37% market share.

The partnership with Amazon is growing. Earlier, the company announced that VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region. AWS CEO Andy Jassy appeared on-stage at VMworld to announced that new VMware Cloud + AWS solutions will be arriving soon for GovCloud, the Amazon initiative for secure government cloud infrastructure. AWS and VMware are also developing new NSX + AWS DirectConnect networking connectivity options.

Amazon Web Services and VMware announced Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on VMware. This service will make it easy for customers to set up, operate, and scale databases in VMware-based software-defined data centers and hybrid environments and to migrate them to AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware agreed to acquire CloudHealth Technologies, a start-up based in Boston. Financial terms were not disclosed. CloudHealth Technologies delivers a cloud operations platform across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. It claims 1,300 customers.

VMware will now support live migration of virtual machines using Nvidia Quadro vDWS vGPUs. Operators can move a guest to another compatible host while performing maintenance on the original server.