New Technical White Paper - Hardware Layer 2 Gateways Integration with ...

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.