VMware has been very busy in the cybersecurity space – we just broke the news about their acquisition of Carbon Black. In addition, the award-winning company’s networking and security portfolio has a number of announcements to deliver greater automation, compliance, visibility, and scale across the data center, cloud, branch and edge.

VMware virtual cloud networking is now deployed by 13,000 customers, 88 of the Fortune 100 and eight of the top 10 Telcos, and reaches more than 150,000 branch offices via VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud. The company says their virtual cloud networking allows customers to experience an average of 59 percent reduction in capital expenditures and 55 percent reduction in operational expenditures.

Today’s announcement includes the introduction of VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer; new and enhanced network and security analytics capabilities, delivered through VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and NSX Intelligence; and continued advancements of VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud, the hyperscale cloud networking solution. Collectively, these solutions enable VMware to deliver the public cloud experience – a fully automated deployment of a data center workload – across any infrastructure, spanning from edge to private data centers, to public clouds. This agility can only be achieved through the automation of all network services, which requires having all switching, routing, security and load balancing services defined in software, centrally managed, and running on distributed, general-purpose servers.

“VMware brings the one-click public cloud experience to the entire enterprise through an automated, software-defined network architecture,” said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager, networking and security business unit, VMware. “VMware is a leader in next-generation software-defined networking and security, delivering consistent, pervasive connectivity and intrinsic security to apps, data and users wherever they reside. We extend this virtual infrastructure across public and private clouds, all the way to the network edge, and our advanced analytics capabilities provide the visibility and troubleshooting needed to make the Virtual Cloud Network easy to operate.”

VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer: Powerful Software-Defined Application Services

The new VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (previously Avi Networks Platform) is a distributed application delivery controller (ADC) built for the cloud, with an architecture that mirrors cloud principles. NSX Advanced Load Balancer helps organizations overcome the complexity and rigidness of legacy systems and ADC appliances with modern, software-defined application delivery services. NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides a software load balancer and intelligent web application firewall, combined with advanced analytics and monitoring to enable a fast, scalable, and intrinsically more secure application experience. The solution’s central control plane and distributed data plane deliver application services as a dynamic, multi-cloud fabric which intelligently automates decisions and provides unprecedented application analytics and on-demand elasticity. Customers can dispatch services, such as load balancing and web application firewall, to any application on any cloud, running on VMs, containers, or bare metal, using one centralized interface.

VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud Delivers Unique Hyperscale Architecture

Today the company announced VMware is the only company that delivers hyperscale SD-WAN through a highly automated, stateless, scale-out design that is akin to the architecture of public clouds like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. VMware achieves hyperscale SD-WAN by having thousands of gateways across every major cloud provider, and hundreds of underlay carrier networks around the world. These gateways are stateless, and horizontally scalable, meaning that new gateways launch with no disruption to the end-user. For customers this means new branch offices and increased application traffic can be added dynamically and automatically without reconfiguration. Changes, if necessary, can be rolled out dynamically to gateways without disruption to the end user. Customers can have tens of thousands of edges on a single network. The cloud gateways provide the automated one-click onramp to all the major public cloud providers, and to VMware Cloud Foundation running in private data centers. With VMware’s hyperscale SD-WAN solution customers achieve rapid speed of deployment, unprecedented economics, improved application performance, better network resiliency and simplified WAN operations.

VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud is a leader in the fast-growing SD-WAN market, as measured by industry analysts. The solution has been chosen by thousands of customers spanning more than 150,000 branch office locations in more than 130 countries around the world. The service is available from a partner network that includes more than 500 partners globally, including system integrators, VARs, MSPs and more than 100 telecom service providers. VMware and Dell EMC are also announcing a co-branded SD-WAN service powered by VMware, which will be sold by approximately 20,000 sellers worldwide.

Pervasive, End-to-End Visibility and Analytics for the Virtual Cloud Network

NSX Intelligence is a new distributed analytics engine built natively into NSX-T. Together, VMware vRealize Network Insight and NSX Intelligence deliver comprehensive visibility, analytics and troubleshooting to improve network and security operations for the Virtual Cloud Network. NSX Intelligence provides continuous data center-wide visibility for network and application security teams, helping them deliver a more granular and dynamic security posture, simplify compliance analysis, and streamline security operations. NSX Intelligence provides deep insight at the packet level into virtualized and containerized workloads, allowing for intuitive, highly automated network and security policy generation and enforcement. NSX Intelligence helps eliminate blind spots to reduce security risk, and accelerate security incident remediation through visualization and deep insight into every flow across the entire datacenter. Customers gain holistic context for security troubleshooting and improve collaboration between infrastructure and security teams through a converged pane for security operations.

The latest release of vRealize Network Insight provides end-to-end visibility and troubleshooting for physical and virtual infrastructure stretching from the data center to the network edge with new support for VMware SD-WAN, and into AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS and now Azure. VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 enhances NSX operations management by extending the PCI Compliance Dashboard for NSX-T, detecting audit changes for firewall rules, and tracking Virtual Tunnel Endpoint (VTEP) latencies.

VMware NSX-T: The Benchmark for Automated, Scalable Software-Defined Networking & Security

VMware NSX-T is the industry’s only network and security platform, delivered completely in software, that offers the full range of L2-L7 services for workloads running on all types of infrastructure – virtual machines, containers, physical servers and both private and public clouds. NSX-T 2.5 further strengthens the platform’s intrinsic security capabilities and delivers expanded scalability, cloud-native support, and operational simplicity. New enhancements include a Native Cloud Enforcement mode that allows customers to increase security of public cloud workloads using native cloud security controls; FIPS 140-2 compliance; the ability to apply Layer 7 application ID-based or context-aware rules to the NSX edge (gateway) firewall for north-south traffic; support for Layer 7 application ID-based distributed firewalling in KVM environments; VPN Enhancements for multi-tenancy; and packet mirroring for east-west traffic monitoring via Service Insertion.

In addition, a new collaboration between Dell EMC and VMware will:

• Re-define the network for the cloud era with tighter integration and combined development efforts
  Modernize network operations and reduce WAN costs with new Dell EMC SD-WAN Solution – one-stop solution combining VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud, Dell EMC managed infrastructure
• Simplify data center fabric deployment, operations through enhanced visibility across virtual and physical networks with new Dell EMC SmartFabric Director

“Our customers today expect us to deliver the best and most advanced network solutions to solve their business needs,” said QOS Networks CEO, Frank Cittadino. “As a trusted partner to Dell EMC, we’re excited to do that with an SD-WAN solution that marries cost-effective hardware with a dedicated orchestrator and VMware gateway. We combine that with our 5-Tool monitoring and management platform.”

The Dell EMC SD-WAN Solution has three key components:

• SD-WAN Edge powered by VMware – networking specific, purpose-built appliances designed for high efficiency and reliability
• SD-WAN Orchestrator – cloud-based management and orchestration software services from VMware, managed by Dell EMC
• SD-WAN Gateways – a global network of more secure, application-focused access gateways from VMware to handle WAN traffic

“ESG was impressed with how the Dell EMC SmartFabric Director can help organizations to gain comprehensive visibility into the physical and virtual layers of their core networks and ensure that they are synchronized,” said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, ESG Research. “We see how the SmartFabric Director can significantly ease the time-consuming process of creating and deploying a network fabric, while simultaneously verifying it will operate as intended.”

Key features include:

• VMware vSphere and VMware NSX-T Data Center Integration – Tight integration with VMware vCenter and NSX-T enables the physical underlay/fabric to be correctly provisioned for the smooth functioning of application workloads in a VMware software-defined data center
• Leaf/Spine Fabric Automation – SmartFabric Director uses a declarative model that allows the user to express intent with a set of three well-defined fabric types. Fabric discovery is an ongoing process and ensures that the wiring is consistent with the user-defined intent and removes guesswork for rapid auto-provisioning
• Fabric Visibility – SmartFabric Director supports highly scalable and flexible streaming telemetry to gather key operational data and statistics from the fabric switches. Comprehensive, highly-intuitive visualization of the time-series data and other information greatly simplifies day-to-day fabric operations 
• Fabric Lifecycle Management – Upgrading switch images is a critical operation in a data center. SmartFabric Director automates the download, install and verification process and ensures that switches are upgraded with the correct images

“VMware and Dell EMC are driving public cloud simplicity and utility across the entire network,” said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager, networking and security business unit, VMware. “With this new SD-WAN solution, Dell EMC customers will be able to leverage the industry’s only hyperscale architecture for SD-WAN deployed at thousands of customers and more than 150,000 locations globally. Our joint engineering on SmartFabric Director will offer customers a tightly-integrated solution for physical to virtual networking visibility, further simplifying network operations and troubleshooting.”

Learn about the latest in everything you need! UCaaS, the Channel, IT, IOT, Edge, Cybersecurity, AI, SD-WAN, and the Future of Work at the world’s only SD-WAN Expo and MSP Expo, part of the ITEXPO #TechSuperShow, Feb 12-14, 2020 Fort Lauderdale, FL.