Eric Sloof

This is the first definitive reference for all network and data center virtualization professionals planning, implementing, or operating VMware NSX 6.2 for vSphere. It is the only NSX guide published by VMware, authored by VMware technical experts, and reflecting the experience of pioneering VMware NSX adopters representing a wide spectrum of environments, use cases, deployment sizes, and feature usage.

Drawing on 50+ years of network, data center, and virtualization experience, the authors offer deep practical insights for maximizing the reliability and value of VMware NSX and the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in any data center environment. You'll master VMware NSX through practical hands-on labs and detailed configuration examples. Coverage includes:

• How VMware vSphere® enables the agile, virtualized data center
• Establishing data center application and network topologies with VMware NSX
• Working with VMware NSX Manager, VMware NSX Controller, and clustering
• Defining logical switch networks with VXLAN
• Transforming routing architectures with the Distributed Logical Router (DLR)
• Implementing NSX edge routing and high availability
• Deploying each leading type of VPN with NSX Edge VPN services
• Balancing loads in your application topology
• Using additional NSX edge services, including Layer 2 bridging, NAT, and DHCP
• Securing your data center network with distributed firewalls
• Automating your security architecture for maximum efficiency
• Architecting, deploying, and migrating to Multi-vCenter NSX
• Monitoring, securing, and optimizing VMware NSX environments

VMware NSX 6.2 for vSphere Essentials pre-order now available

The VMware vCloud Air Network is an ecosystem of over 4,000 service providers located in more than 100 countries offering VMware based cloud services. Local providers ensure data sovereignty while providing a wide range of cloud services and vertical market expertise through specialized compliance and certifications.

vCloud Air Network providers are uniquely positioned to offer their services to the market and become a seamless extension of existing VMware enterprise customers’ on-premises data centers. Having the capability to move workloads in and out of the customers’ chosen cloud platform is a key factor for most enterprise customers in helping them maintain their existing investments with their on-premises applications, and to avoid lock-in to any one vendor or provider.


Disaster recovery and risk management is a key priority on all CIOs’ agendas for 2016, and being able to offer a disaster recovery service between their own data center and a vCloud Air Network provider offers economies of scale, lower capital cost, and a lower operational cost model for protecting business critical applications and investments.

This document explores a potential solution where the end customer and the vCloud Air Network provider have common components running in their data centers to achieve a unified hybrid cloud experience offering seamless workload mobility and disaster recovery services to the end customers. 

Use VMware Log Insight and NSX to determine applications flows on any application. Take the logs and provide Microsegmentation around the workload. Tier Security Groups to enforce and then use custom DFW tags to make these into visual charts. By Anthony Burke from VMware.

This document is targeted at networking and virtualization architects interested in deploying VMware NSX Network virtualization solution. VMware’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) vision leverages core data center virtualization technologies to transform data center economics and business agility through automation and non-disruptive deployment that embraces and extends existing compute, network and storage infrastructure investments. NSX is the component providing the networking virtualization pillar of this vision.

As a platform, NSX provides partners the capability of integrating their solution and build on the top of the existing functionalities. NSX enables an agile overlay infrastructure for Public and Private Cloud environments leveraging a resilient underlay infrastructure. In many data centers, some workloads have not been virtualized, or cannot be virtualized.


In order to integrate them into the SDDC architecture, NSX provides the capability of extending virtual networking to the physical one by the way of Layer 2 or Layer 3 gateways. This document will focus on the Layer 2 gateway feature, and how it can be achieved natively on a host running NSX, but also through a third party hardware device that can still be controlled by NSX.

This first part of this document presents a summary of the benefits of NSX and the use cases for a Layer 2 gateway service. The second part will focus on the technical overview of the solution and the configuration required on the NSX side for the integration of a third party hardware-based layer 2 gateway.

Fully updated for the newest versions of VMware Virtual SAN, this guide show how to scale VMware's fully distributed storage architecture to meet any enterprise storage requirement. World-class Virtual SAN experts Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping thoroughly explain how Virtual SAN integrates into vSphere 6.x and enables the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). You'll learn how to take full advantage of Virtual SAN, and get up-to-the-minute insider guidance for architecture, implementation, and management.

Writing for administrators, consultants, and architects, Hogan and Epping show how Virtual SAN implements both object-based storage and a policy platform that simplifies VM storage placement. You'll discover how the latest versions of Virtual SAN and vSphere combine to dramatically improve resiliency, scale-out storage functionality, and control over QoS. This edition's extensive new coverage includes:

• All new VMware Virtual SAN functionality and updates since the first edition
• An entirely new chapter on stretched clustering and ROBO configurations
• New discussions of the VM file format, de-deduplication, compression, checksums, encryption, and the Health UI
• Advanced techniques for delivering enterprise-grade storage capabilities with Virtual SAN

Both an up-to-the-minute reference and hands-on tutorial, Essential Virtual SAN, Second Edition uses realistic examples to demonstrate Virtual SAN's most powerful capabilities. You'll learn how to plan, architect, and deploy Virtual SAN successfully, avoid gotchas, troubleshoot problems, and make the most of virtualized storage as you move towards the Software Defined Data Center.

Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN): Administrator’s Guide to VMware Virtual SAN, Second Edition

VMware Virtual SAN is a distributed object storage platform that depends on IP Network connectivity to provide access to storage resources and storage management infrastructure services. Virtual SAN requires that all of the participating hosts can communicate over an IP network and are members of the same vSphere Cluster.

The locally attached storage devices from all of the hosts are pooled and presented as a single datastore to all members of the cluster once they have established IP connectivity and can communicate on the same Ethernet Layer 2 domain.

Virtual SAN clusters can also be formed with hosts that are connected to different Layer 3 network segments. The network Layer 3 segments must first be configured with IP Multicast in order to make all segments reachable by all the members of the cluster. Although the Virtual SAN network traffic and Virtual Machine traffic can coexist on the same networks, this paper will not cover the configuration semantics and tuning of Virtual Machine network traffic.

The focus of this paper is based on the physical network and vSphere related technologies that are required to deploy Virtual SAN across Layer 2 and Layer 3 topologies. This paper will help virtualization, network, and storage implementation engineers, administrators, and architects interested in deploying Virtual SAN on Layer 2 and across Layer 3 network topologies