Mastering VMware NSX for vSphere

Elver Sena Sosa

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119513537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Virtualización

A clear, comprehensive guide to VMware ' s latest virtualization solution

Mastering VMware NSX for vSphere is the ultimate guide to VMware's network security virtualization platform. Written by a rock star in the VMware community, this book offers invaluable guidance and crucial reference for every facet of NSX, with clear explanations that go far beyond the public documentation. Coverage includes NSX architecture, controllers, and edges; preparation and deployment; logical switches; VLANS and VXLANS; logical routers; virtualization; edge network services; firewall security; and much more to help you take full advantage of the platform's many features.

More and more organizations are recognizing both the need for stronger network security and the powerful solution that is NSX; usage has doubled in the past year alone, and that trend is projected to grow—and these organizations need qualified professionals who know how to work effectively with the NSX platform. This book covers everything you need to know to exploit the platform's full functionality so you can:

• Step up security at the application level
• Automate security and networking services
• Streamline infrastructure for better continuity
• Improve compliance by isolating systems that handle sensitive data

VMware's NSX provides advanced security tools at a lower cost than traditional networking. As server virtualization has already become a de facto standard in many circles, network virtualization will follow quickly—and NSX positions VMware in the lead the way vSphere won the servers. NSX allows you to boost security at a granular level, streamline compliance, and build a more robust defense against the sort of problems that make headlines. Mastering VMware NSX for vSphere helps you get up to speed quickly and put this powerful platform to work for your organization.

Chapter 1
Abstracting Network and Security

In this chapter, we will examine the evolution of Data Center Networking and Security from the 1990s to the present in order to better understand how network virtualization in today's data centers provides solutions that reduce costs, greatly improve manageability, and increase security.

Most IT professionals are familiar with server virtualization using virtual machines (VMs). A virtual machine is purely software. An abstraction layer creates a way to decouple the physical hardware resources from that software. In doing so, the VM becomes a collection of files that can be backed up, moved, or allocated more resources without having to make changes to the physical environment.

We will delve into how VMware NSX is the next step in data center evolution, allowing virtualization to extend beyond servers. Routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and other networking components can all be virtualized through NSX. NSX provides an abstraction layer that decouples these components from the underlying physical hardware, which provides administrators with new solutions that further reduce costs, improve manageability, and increase security across the entire data center.

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IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL LEARN ABOUT:

• The evolution of the modern data center
• How early networks created a need for data centers
• Colocation: the sharing of provider data centers
• Challenges in cost, resource allocation, and provisioning
• VMware server virtualization
• VMware storage virtualization
• VMware NSX: virtual networking and security

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Networks: 1990s

The 1990s brought about changes to networking that we take for granted today. We shifted from the original Ethernet design of half-duplex communication, where devices take turns sending data, to full duplex. With full duplex, each device had a dedicated connection to the network that allowed us to send and receive simultaneously, while at the same time reducing collisions on the wire to zero (see Figure 1.1). The move to full duplex effectively doubled our throughput.

FIGURE 1.1 Simplex, half duplex, and full duplex compared

100 Mbps Ethernet connections became possible and the technology was given the unfortunate name Fast Ethernet, a label that has not aged well considering that available 100 GB ports of today are 1000 times faster than the '90s version of “Fast.”

The '90s also ushered in our first cable modems, converging data and voice with VoIP, and of course, the Internet's explosion in popularity. As Internet businesses started to boom, a demand was created for a place to host business servers. They needed reliable connectivity and an environment that provided the necessary power and cooling along with physical security. They needed a data center. Although it was possible for an organization to build its own dedicated data centers, it was both costly and time-consuming, especially for online startups booming in the '90s.

Colocation

An attractive solution, especially for startups, was colocation. Many providers offered relatively inexpensive hosting plans, allowing businesses to move their physical servers and networking devices to the provider's ready-made data center. With colocation, organizations were essentially renting space, but they still maintained complete control over their physical devices (see Figure 1.2). The organization was still responsible for installing the operating system, upgrades, and backups. The only real difference was that the location of their compute resources had changed from locally hosted to the provider site.

FIGURE 1.2 Colocated space rented in provider data centers

The Internet boom of the '90s meant that due to web computing, a massive amount of data was being generated, which created a need for storage solutions such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS. One major benefit in having these resources together in a data center was centralized management.

Not all data centers looked as impressive in the '90s as they do today. Google's first data center was created in 1998, and was just a 7 × 4 foot cage with only enough space for 30 servers on shelves.

Workload-to-Server Ratio

The general design choice at the time was that each server would handle a single workload in a 1:1 ratio. To support a new workload, you bought another server, installed an operating system, and deployed it. There were numerous issues with this plan.

Inefficient Resource Allocation

There was no centrali...