VMware Inc. is accelerating its drive to lead the growing market for software-defined wide-area networks with the release today of new versions of key components of its Virtual Cloud Network.

The announcement moves the computing virtualization provider closer to its stated goal of making network management within the enterprise as easy as it is in the public cloud. The company said its Virtual Cloud Network, the roadmap for which it unveiled barely two years ago, now has 15,000 customers, including 89 of the Fortune 100, and is growing 50% annually.

With 225,000 branch offices now managed by its software, “VMware is the No. 1 SD-WAN vendor,” said Tom Gillis (pictured), general manager of the company’s networking and security business unit.

VMware is taking dead aim at Cisco Systems Inc., which has been racing to shift its product focus from hardware to software as customers seek to virtualize complex on-premises and cloud networks spanning multiple locations. The simplicity of a virtualized approach was borne out during the early stages of the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S. when “we deployed in one customer’s case, 5,000 employees to work from home in five days,” said Sanjay Uppal, general manager of the VeloCloud business unit and founder of VeloCloud Networks Inc., which is one of several companies VMware has acquired to build out its SD-WAN portfolio.

The company’s announcements today include new releases of its NSX-T SDN platform and vRealize Network Insight operations manager.

Cloudlike management

NSX-T 3.0 introduces NSX Federation, a cloud-like concept that applies fault isolation domains and global policies synchronized across locations. A fault isolation domain isolates network problems with a single zone to minimize impact.

With the NSX-T 3.0 release, customers can extend full-stack container networking services such as switching, routing, distributed firewall, micro-segmentation, and load balancing to the recently announced vSphere with Kubernetes and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 platforms as well as the VMware Tanzu portfolio and non-VMware Kubernetes platforms.

The new release also supports level three Ethernet virtual private networks for VM mobility, multicast routing for scalable networking and accelerated data plane performance.

Version 5.2 of vRealize Network Insight introduces flow-based application discovery across multiple VMware platforms using machine learning to better understand categorized applications by tier. Among the more than 300 new features are intrusion detection and prevention capabilities for the service-defined firewall the company introduced last year.

The IDS/IPS matches signatures to specific parts of the application using what the company said is its intrinsic understanding of underlying services. Signatures are application-specific and are only applied to the appropriate servers, resulting in fewer false positives. The services can run on a combination of platforms including virtual machines, containers and bare metal servers.

“For the last two years we’ve been investing heavily in containers,” said Umesh Mahajan, general manager of NSX networking and security and co-founder of Avi Networks Inc., another VMware acquisition. “We’ve made virtual machines, containers and bare metal workloads all first-class citizens.”

VMware vRealize Network Insight can troubleshoot the entire Virtual Cloud Network, including the virtual overlay and physical underlay, across data centers, multi-cloud environments and branch locations. Machine learning-enabled flow-based application discovery identifies application and tier boundaries and provides visibility insights into network communication density, applications patterns and enhanced security recommendations.

The release also supports Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Direct Connect, VMware SD-WAN application and business policy statistics.

The company also said it’s working with Microsoft Corp. to offer SD-WAN support for Azure Edge Zones, which deliver Azure services at the network edge. This will enable customers to deploy virtual network functions simple across zones.

NSX-T 3.0 is available today and vRealize Network Insight 5.2 will be available later this month.

Photo: SiliconANGLE