VMware Inc. took to the stage at Pivotal Software Inc.’s SpringOne Platform conference in San Francisco today to announce an updated version of its NSX virtual networking software.

The virtualization giant offers two different versions of its software-defined networking software. NSX is the better known and more widely used of the two. It integrates with the company’s vSphere virtualization management software product and its ESXi compute hypervisor.

NSX-T is the newer version, released in 2016. It’s designed to support hypervisors other than ESXi, such as the Kernel Virtual Machine for Linux-powered systems. It was originally built to run in public and private cloud environments such as OpenStack, but more recently VMware has extended it to support application container networking as well.

The newly updated version, NSX-T 2.1, builds on that support with new features that aim to make it easier to manage the network requirements of cloud-native and container-based applications, the company said.

The move is the latest example of a networking provider moving to support automation in cloud environments that host modern application development systems such as software containers, a way of allowing applications to run unchanged on different computer platforms.

The biggest update is that NSX-T 2.1 supports the latest version of Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service, which is a container-centric application development platform also launched at SpringOne this week.

NSX-T 2.1 is designed to enable advanced networking and security for Cloud Foundry’s new Pivotal Container Service, which was jointly developed by VMware, Pivotal and Google LLC VMware said NSXT-2.1 will enable something called Layer 3 container networking and also advanced networking services such as load balancing and microsegmentation.

“For development teams, these integrations mean that they will be able to operate quickly and consume infrastructure as code,” said Scott Goodman, a product marketing manager at VMware. “Meanwhile, their workflows will remain the same … because NSX-T will integrate tightly with these application platforms, connecting directly into the Container Networking Interface, fitting into the existing application development tools that developers are already using.”

The end result, Goodman said, is that these advanced networking and security services can be automatically provisioned to support developer’s containers and microservices, creating what he calls a “truly full stack developer cloud.”

VMware said NSX-T 2.1 will be generally available in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2018.

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