From NSX-V to NSX-T. An Adventure.

I posted a while ago that NSX-T is the future, and the future is now.

And I entirely stand by that statement. While NSX-V is currently the software-defined networking standard at VMware, its time will come.
NSX-T is the architecture of the future. It’s the platrform for both NSX Data Center and NSX Cloud. The tooling you will use to define your networking and security capabilities and policies consistently between on-prem and off.

As it stands, today, NSX-T is really more for developer clouds. It has different capabilities than NSX-V, though the gap is shrinking dramatically with each release – NSX-T 2.2.0 can do an awful lot of cool stuff, and much of the stuff you may be accustomed to doing now with NSX-V. The proverbial “tomorrow” is close, indeed, and tomorrow, NSX-T will take the crown as king of the VMware SDN kingdom. Fortunately, this is not going to be a coup, but rather a peaceful transition (well, maybe not if you want to migrate in-place, but that’s a whole different discussion).

What I want to do in this series is to lay out the similarities and differences of the two platforms, as they stand today (NSX-V 6.4.1 and NSX-T 2.2.0). I will not cover positively everything – just what I would consider the basics. That’s still a significant list – my outline is crazy right now. Maybe it’ll become more manageable, maybe I’m just going to spend an awful lot of time writing. Hopefully, I will provide the information you need to essentially translate your NSX-V vocabulary to NSX-T.

That’s the goal. Remember, this isn’t going to be deep technical content – just a whirlwind tour through the new platform with comparisons to what you’re already familiar with.

I won’t be getting into the API, as that’s just not my wheelhouse right now – I can spell JSON, but not much more than that. So I won’t be covering cool stuff like Dashboard customizations, but there’s plenty for me to work on without that.

Join me on my journey through the wilds of NSX, here’s to hoping that we’ll both learn something!

~$ history
Introduction: From NSX-V to NSX-T. An Adventure
NSX-T: The Manager of All Things NSX
The Hall of the Mountain King. or “What Loot do We Find in nsxcli?”
Three Controllers to Rule Them All (that just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?)
Beyond Centralization: The Local Control Plane
Transport Zones, Logical Switchies, and Overlays! Oh, My!
Which Way Do We Go? Let’s ask the Logical Router!
If You’re Not Living on the Edge, You’re Taking Up Too Much Room
Welcome to the Edge, I’m at Your Service
Tooling and Operations