NSXT

NSX-T Data Center, commonly abbreviated NSXT, is VMware's network virtualization and security platform designed to deliver logical networking and micro-segmentation across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. It is engineered to operate across multiple hypervisors and public clouds, enabling consistent networking for traditional workloads and modern cloud-native applications, including those running in containers.

Architecture consists of a management plane, control plane, and data plane. The management plane is provided by NSX Manager, which exposes the user interface and API access. The control plane is distributed and policy-driven, while the data plane runs on hypervisors and Edge nodes to implement distributed switching and routing. Logical constructs include segments, and Tier-0 and Tier-1 routers.

Key capabilities include a distributed firewall with micro-segmentation, distributed logical switching and routing, NAT and VPN services, and built-in load balancing. NSXT supports multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud deployments, container networking with Kubernetes integration, and automation via REST APIs with tooling such as Terraform and Ansible.

Common use cases are data center modernization, consistent networking across VMware and non- VMware environments, and secure application delivery through micro-segmentation. It is frequently deployed alongside Kubernetes platforms like Tanzu to provide container networking and policy enforcement.

History: NSX-T Data Center emerged from VMware's NSX architecture as a hypervisor-agnostic networking solution, designed to support ESXi and KVM as well as cloud integrations.