Transforming Networking and Security for the Digital Era#
Wednesday morning I attended the Network and Security keynote which, if I’m honest, I found to be a bit boring. To be fair, it was probably aimed at business leaders and maybe not those that are technical. There were three customer stories, but I would have liked to have heard much more about the problems that NSX solved for them specifically, rather than being datacenter transformation/cloud journey stories that included NSX. For me, it felt like there was nothing new in the presentation that hadn’t been covered in the general sessions. I would have liked to have seen and heard a bit more what the NSBU’s leadership think is going to be big over the next 5 years.
NSX-T Advanced Architecture Concepts #NET1863BE#
Following on from the introduction to NSX-T Architecture yesterday, I wanted to dig a little deeper into a product that I should be delivering to customers in the very near future. It was presented by Dimitiri Desmidt (from the intro session) and Yasen Simeonov. Dimitri especially was an excellent speaker, and (as is often the case with these sessions) outshone his co-presenter - however both were very knowledgeable presenters.
I wanted this session to go in depth on some of the topics covered in the introduction session, which they delivered, and I thought they compared and contrasted some of the similarities and differences between NSX-v and NSX-T really well. It was great to see some packet walks through the tier0 and tier1 distributed routing setups, as well as getting a good understanding of the enhancements GENEVE brings as an encapsulation protocol (replacing VXLAN).
I think this was one of the most enjoyable sessions I’ve attended this week, purely from a geeking out technical point of view! NSX-T looks great and addresses some of the areas where NSX-v falls short, such as scalability.