VMware NSX-V vs NSX-T Comparison

What is VMware NSX

Nowadays, most modern data centers use hardware virtualization to reduce costs and increase flexibility. In this industry, you certainly won’t miss VMware, whose VMware ESXi is one of the most popular type-1 hypervisors.

The network is a critical component of every data center. VMware offers the VMware NSX solution for building software-defined networking (SDN). VMware SDN NSX is a powerful technology designed to make the networks agile and flexible. Compared to traditional networks, SDN improves network control by enabling enterprises and service providers to respond quickly to changing business needs.

Now VMware NSX product has 2 different versions, VMware NSX-V and VMware NSX-T. This article will briefly introduce them and compare the NSX-T NSX-V difference.

What is NSX-V

The “V” in VMware NSX-V solution stands for “vSphere”, which means it is a vSphere-only solution, supports only the vSphere hypervisor environment.

It is the first version of VMware NSX, and requires both VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter. vCenter Server is defined as the compute manager for the VMware NSX-V solution. When VMware NSX-V is installed, it registers with your vCenter Server, and the solution integrates into vSphere through the connection with vCenter.

Through Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), an encapsulation protocol that provides connectivity between data centers through tunneling, VMware NSX-V can create logical, virtual networks and the ability to “stretch” and architect networks in a way that solves very complex problems. It also allows creating virtual constructs such as the L2 logical switch, distributed logical routers, load balancers, and other features.

As organizations have transitioned from mainly on-premises data centers to leverage the cloud for many workloads, a modern network virtualization solution needs to scale beyond VMware vSphere and allow organizations to use network virtualization with modern cloud-native platforms. Therefore, VMware NSX-V was gradually deprecated, and VMware then present NSX-T.

What is NSX-T

VMware NSX-T is the new, modern release of VMware NSX, the “T” in NSX-T stands for “Transformers”. VMware NSX-T is a multi-cloud solution for modernizing networking and security in enterprise, cloud-native environments and everything in between. It allows organizations to stitch together network connections in an effective, efficient, and seamless way, including infrastructure components such as virtual machines, containers, and even bare metal workloads.

Instead of using the very common VXLAN, VMware NSX-T has moved forward using the Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE) network encapsulation protocol. GENEVE is an open standard that does not include information or specification for the control plane. While it works almost identically to VXLAN, it offers more flexibility in its implementation because of control plane independence.

VMware NSX-T removes the requirement for VMware vCenter Server to deploy the solution, so you can deploy VMware NSX-T VMware ESXi host transport nodes without vCenter Server altogether.

VMware NSX-V vs NSX-T comparison

Upgraded from NXS-V to NSX-T, VMware has developed it into a more powerful solution through multi-platform compatibility and interaction. Except for that, there are also more functional NSX-V NSX-T differences.

▶ VMware vCenter Reliance

VMware NSX-V is a VMware vSphere-only solution. It requires a connection to vCenter Server for integration with the ESXi hosts.

VMware NSX-T does not require a vCenter Server and allows interacting with ESXi hosts directly and onboard those as transport nodes. It is not a vSphere-specific network virtualization platform.

▶ Overlay technology

VMware NSX-V uses Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) as the overlay technology that creates the virtualized network infrastructure.

VMware NSX-T uses the Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE) as the overlay network encapsulation protocol, which helps overcome some of the limitations of more traditional network encapsulation protocols like VXLAN.

▶ Routing

VMware NSX-V uses a more traditional routing architecture.

VMware NSX-T introduces a multi-tier routing architecture, which is a much better approach for multi-tenant environments.

▶ Feature parity

In the early days of the solution, VMware NSX-T did not have feature parity with VMware NSX-V. However, now, VMware NSX-T has effectively surpassed VMware NSX-V in terms of what it can do and the powerful integrations with other solutions like NSX Intelligence.

▶ Lifecycle and End of Life

VMware NSX-V is a solution that will be going end of life in 2022 and then extended technical guidance will be ended in 2023.

VMware NSX-T is the next generation product for replacing and upgrading NSX-V, a modern solution for VMware vSphere and multi-cloud environments.

Protect VM data by backing up VMs on VMware ESXi

Virtual machine backup is a common way to protect VM data. However, neither do ESXi host nor vCenter Server provide the backup feature. Using a dedicated backup tool is the most commonly accepted way to protect VM data, and is by far the most convenient.

Here I introduce you to a free VMware backup software -- AOMEI Cyber Backup. It offers you the following benefits.

✦ Agentless Backup: create complete and independent image-level backup for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V VMs.
✦ Support Free ESXi: support both paid and free versions of VMware ESXi.
✦ Multiple Storage Destinations: backup to local or network share destinations.
✦ Automated Execution: create backup schedules to automate virtual machine protection.
✦ Role Assignment: allows one administrator to create sub-accounts with limited privileges.
✦ Perpetual Free: you can use AOMEI Cyber Backup Free Edition with no time limit.

AOMEI Cyber Backup supports VMware ESXi 6.0 and later versions. And simplifies the process of backing up VMs into 3 simple steps. You can click the following button to download the freeware.

Summary

The network is critical to the business of data centers. VMware has also upgraded its NSX-V product to NSX-T. In this article, I introduced what is VMware NSX, and made a VMware NSX-V vs NSX-T comparison.

After configuration, you may also want to specify an appropriate protection schedule for your VMware ESXi virtual machine data. You can use AOMEI Cyber Backup, a dedicated backup tool to back up VMware ESXi VMs and create scheduled backup tasks to run it daily, weekly, monthly.