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You're too NSX-y for this straitjacket

VCE and VMware are taking network virtualisation beyond the big end of town

EMC's recently-reintegrated hyperconverged storage arm VCE yesterday announced a new “VCE Foundation for Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud”.

It's not colossally different from the outfit's current vBlocks, save that it brings VMware's NSX network virtualisation, vRealize management code and EMC's ViPR software-defined-storage product into VCE's everything-in-this-box-has-been-tested-to-work-together-we-promise way of doing things.

VCE's reciting its usual “one number to call, and one throat to choke makes Johnny an agile business” spiel that's served it well enough to claim it has a billion-dollar annual run rate.

That VCE is now releasing products that bake in more of its siblings products is no surprise, for two reasons. The first is that once Cisco exited active participation in the company (and EMC took over) deeper integration of EMC Federation products was always on the cards not least because with Cisco now a silent partner competitive tension around network virtualisation went away.

The second is that VCE CEO Praveen Akkiraju last year told The Reg that he and his team recognise that while the vBlock proposition is powerful, customers want hybrid clouds.

We didn't report that opinion at the time because the absorption by EMC was not complete and Akkiraju needed to confine himself to the anodyne during our chat, lest a lawyer object.

However, the remarks about hybrid cloud now look important in the light of this week's vSphere 6 launch the January integration of NSX and VMware's vCloud Air.

When Virtzilla launched NSX it unashamedly said it wasn't for everyone. Service providers and organisations with very large data centres were the initial targets. IT pros told your faithful correspondent there was no need to even consider it unless one ran 5,000 or more VMs.

However, NSX's ability to apply network and security rules policies to newly-spawned connections is obviously useful if one is stretching apps into clouds. NSX's inclusion in vCloud Air therefore makes that cloud rather more useful because on-premises security arrangements can be extended into the cloud without enormous fuss.

Cloudbursting or other hybrid arrangements can therefore be considered, safe in the knowledge that NSX will make the networking and security infrastructure surrounding an app conform to on-premises policies.

NSX therefore comes out of the realm of enormo-scale operators and into at least the peripheral vision of any organisation thinking about hybrid cloud. And as Akkiraju and plenty of other folk know, that's an awful lot of people.

That VCE now bakes NSX into vBlocks is therefore not just the EMC Federation playing happy families. It's also NSX going just about mainstream.

Now imagine we're a year or two down the track. Microservices are taking off and lots of developers are keen on spawning containers that chat to other parts of their apps over APIs.

Those containers could appear in their thousands every day, plenty of them in the cloud. At which point NSX becomes even more valuable, because attaching a network security policy to those microservices, and doing on-the-fly network configuration so they can build the links they need when they need them, will be more than welcome.

We also know VMware is interested in microservices because it convened a meeting to talk about standards in the space and also because sibling Pivotal thinks they're a grand way to do software.

Long story short, The Reg's virtualisation desk is convinced that over the last couple of weeks NSX has started to make real strides towards the mainstream. VMware's already taking $100m a year from the 400 customers it's signed up. Soon it may well be your turn.

What comes next for VMware and VCE? Let's not forget that NSX Daddy Martin Casado has hinted he's got some ideas about how to turn security on its head. With vSphere in good shape, end-user computing coming along nicely, network and storage virtualisation turning into businesses, Casado's efforts might just be VMware's next pursuit. ®

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