The VxBlock 1000 is the de-facto standard in CI excellence and delivers proven high scale performance within a fault tolerant and uniquely robust architecture. Moreover, the VxBlock 1000 is purposefully designed to perpetually accept new platforms and technologies and to avoid the technical debt associated with older generation and monolithic IT platform choices. Built with a focus on High Value Traditional Applications (HVTAs), the VxBlock 1000 is flexible and adaptable to meet the technical requirements and challenges of the cloud enabled, multi-cloud, and cloud-native applications architecture landscape.

VMware NSX-T, or VMware NSX Data Center, is a software-defined platform that is engineered to deliver a virtualized Layer 2 through Layer 7 set of networking and security services across heterogeneous endpoints, hypervisors, and clouds. Since its inception, it has continually provided new functionality and a broad suite of services, on top of the core set of services offered by NSX Data Center, including NSX Cloud, NSX Distributed IDS/IPS, NSX Advanced Load Balancer, and VMware SD-WAN. For additional information about these products, see the VMware Docs site (https://docs.vmware.com/).

In this paper, we will limit the scope of the discussion to the core set of services offered by VMware NSX Data Center (NSX-T). While there is some overlap between the features and functionality between NSX-T and the soon-to-be-retired NSX-V, they differ significantly in terms of scale and their native ability to support cloud, cloud-native (container), and application-centric use cases in an agnostic fashion.

NSX-T is designed to support multiple heterogenous endpoints, hypervisors, and clouds by decoupling the direct dependency between the NSX-V management and control planes from VMware vSphere vCenter. This decoupling transformed NSX Data Center from what was essentially a set of networking and security features strictly bound by and limited to the core capabilities of vSphere, to a standalone, infinitely scalable Data Center, Cloud, and Edge-capable, software-defined networking and security architecture.

To understand how NSX-T helps organizations achieve a scalable, robust, software defined and extensible network and security architecture, let's examine the underlying architectural components of the VxBlock 1000. The following design criteria are at the heart of any enterprise-ready, software-defined architecture at scale:

• Architectural persistence
• Availability
• Manageability
• Performance
• Extensibility and interoperability

This paper will explore how the VxBlock 1000 architecture, combined with the VMware NSX-T software that is configured on the platform, satisfy these design criteria, both at initial launch and as the combined software and hardware platform evolve over time. To address this challenge, let us first focus on describing and understanding both architectures and how they combine.

Figure 1.         Persistent Architecture at Scale

To meet these requirements, the VxBlock 1000 offers unparalleled architectural excellence that includes engineered and systematic performance, reliability and redundancy at scale with no single point of failure. The platform has been purposefully designed to meet the needs and requirements of new emerging cloud and software-defined use cases. The implementation of VMware NSX-T is an example of how the VxBlock 1000 accepts and incorporates new software-based offerings by leveraging its native persistent architecture.

This white paper describes this integrated offering, and how VMware NSX-T and VxBlock 1000 together meet the requirements of an ‘enterprise ready’ software-defined architecture at scale.