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The past, present and cloud-based future of VMware’s software-defined networking technology.
hen VMware purchased Nicira in 2012, it wasn’t merely making a play to block a competitor. Nor was it merely throwing some money against the wall to see if it would turn into something useful; I considered Nicira, which eventually turned into VMware’s NSX, to be the future of networking.
Yet, despite my personal bullishness, gaps remain in NSX and the battle is not yet won.
At the time of purchase, Nicira was one of a handful of overlay network startups looking to redefine how you do networking. Tradi- tional networking companies, as well as the open source community, were all working toward solutions to the problems of net- working at scale that x86 virtualization—and especially large-scale self-service cloud computing—had brought to the table.
The biggest problems to be solved were the limit of 4096 virtual local area networks (VLANs), the requirements of tenants in a multi-tenant environment to have overlapping
IP space, and the need for a means to programmatically manage this. The management layer needed to be capable of managing network- ing across multiple networks spanning multiple sites, including sites that the customer did not themselves control, such as the workloads hosted by a services provider or in the public cloud.
One result of this was virtual eXtensible local area networks (VXLANs) in RFC 7348. Though the formal document landed in 2014, it was a long road to get there. The IT industry isn’t really great about open standards; before they land, everyone tries to cement their own pro- prietary solution. Lock-in is always the name of the game.
VXLAN, however, wasn’t the only piece of the puzzle. In order for VXLAN to work, some form of distributed switch needed to exist. This distributed switch needed to live on top of an existing infra- structure. At the time of VMware’s purchase of Nicira, that meant x86 virtualization, because containers weren’t a thing quite yet.
Nicira’s technology was arguably the best of the bunch; however, without the backing of one of the industry’s tech titans, there was little chance it would become the future of networking. In 2012 net- works were Cisco’s turf, and it was pointless to pretend otherwise. Cisco set the agenda and the rest of the world followed along.
Two tech titans were—and remain—key to the future of networking. While the hardware side of the industry is experiencing a period of market share diversification, Cisco is unquestionably at the forefront of technology advances. Similarly, while x86 virtualization plateaus, VMware is charging ahead into the private, services provider and hybrid cloud spaces, as well as tackling containers with Photon.
The largesse and customer base of both organizations will ensure their relevance for quite some time. Cisco has focused its software-defined networking (SDN) efforts on its application- centric infrastructure (ACI). VMware has focused on NSX. Several smaller players still linger, some pushing proprietary solutions, but many are building upon open standards and open source technologies.
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