I find it interesting, as I’m taking my first real steps into the world of VMware NSX, that there is no Cisco equipment supported as a VMware NSX hardware gateway (VTEP). According to the HCL on March 13th, 2018 there is a complete lack of “Cisco” in the “Partner” category:
I wonder how that works out for Cisco UCS customers.
As I continue to remind vendors, virtualization environments cannot virtualize everything. There are still dependencies on things like DNS, DHCP, NTP, and AD that need a few physical servers. There will also always be a few hosts that can’t be virtualized because of vendor requirements, politics, and/or fear. Any solution for a virtual environment needs to help take care of those systems or it’s not a solution people can use. Beyond that, most people are unwilling to spend precious time and funds on two solutions. The most amazing solution for VM backup, monitoring, or security is useless if you don’t solve my entire problem, which includes the core dependencies I have running as physical hosts.
Folks like Rubrik and Veeam caught on and solved the problem with backup agents. Now we can back up the physical hosts we still have. Extending NSX services, especially security, to the physical systems would help immensely, too. This functionality is “table stakes” now, base functionality customers expect as we design new systems and refresh old ones, but lots of others are missing the boat, too. HPE only has two models of switches listed. Dell only has three. None of them are 25 Gbps. Most of them aren’t certified for recent NSX releases, either.
This seems like a fly in VMware’s NSX ointment. Is it weak demand for NSX that is leading to networking vendors not supporting VXLAN? Or is it terrible networking products that are causing a lack of NSX sales because of their inability to support these features? Whatever it is, this stands as a big opportunity for players like Arista to stand out and eat Cisco, Dell, and HPE’s lunches by being a big and reliable part of the solution, not just another perpetuation of the problem.