Currently I'm running a project in my Organization to do a micro segmentation in every business unit and address more granular access and Zero trust privilege access. And of course project it self changes all the time because of one reason, Agile PM. As a scope of the project, Micro segmentation in SDDC is a mandatory and of course NSX the solution when you have 99 % of the traffic East-West (Thank you vRNI).
Business come with a reasonable question - containers ? do we plan to support them?
Well here game started to change, obviously NSXv is not designed to be used for containers and now we need to reconsider our Design and Proposal for Micro Segmentation. We need to use something else. Cisco come with a nice marketing approach NSX will not help you with containers, which is true , or partially true NSXv will not help us , is not designed to be used for this use case.
So then what ????? Answer is NSX-T.
NSX-T come from Transformers, meaning that now NSX can transform to any kind of environment vSphere native one or KVM, cloud and so on.
Lets take a look close to NSX -T.
Please note this is original architecture of NSX-T and from where it comes from version 1.0. I will address differences in version 2.x later, focus is to get basics and understand from where we come. Like you cant do Routing without know what is MAC and IP.
NSX come from to successors, one is called NSX MH (Multi Hypervisor which was not ready to take over because it was to advance when it was announced ) and NSXv.
From the picture above you can see that is hybrid between NSX MH and NSXv. I will not explain what is written on the slide, if you have question please post them here and I will answer(if I know the answer ).
Now we know how NSX-t how was born let see some use cases , for what we can use NSX-T and why developers looking for IT.
Main use cases for NSXT is that it support containers and not tied to vSphere and vCenter which give you flexibility to use and choose the platform and Cloud. How to choose between NSXv and NSXT is sounds hard it look like same functionalities on both/ or similar answer is by use cases of the needs.
When you run a project it really important to get requirements from the beginning and have a plan B for the question like main CONTAINERS ???
If a you have a virtualized application in a data center and our only requirement is to create network virtualization for existing applications, then I will recommend NSX-V.
But if you are , running a classical application on vSphere, and there is a planning to build modern applications based on Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift, then NSX-T.
NSXT Architecture
AS you can see there is a difference between architecture of NSXv and NSXT and the most confused one is : Transport Nodes, Edge Clusters, and Uplink Groups.
Hope this will give you an intro for NSXT
I will cover more in detail how to use NSXT