A Closer Look at NSX-Telco Showcases from Mobile World Congress 2023

VMware Cloud Networking and Security for Telco Cloud Platform

Efficiency, scalability, and security are critical for modern telco networks. Operating modern 5G network infrastructure requires the ability to manage complex network operations across large-scale multi-cloud and edge environments while also meeting complex security requirements.

The VMware Telco Cloud Platform was built from the ground up to help Communications Service Providers (CSPs) meet these challenges. It combines the capabilities of VMware’s cloud infrastructure and network virtualization software (VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX) with a set of networking, security, and management tools built for the telco industry. Running on top of the VIM (Virtual Infrastructure Manager), VMware Telco Cloud Automation (TCA) accelerates network service time-to-market and ignites operational agility through unified automation, across networks and clouds.

VMware TCA leverages NSX Advanced Load Balancer and Tanzu Service Mesh along with new networking and security features (SmartNIC, Antrea, EVPN, IPv6) to orchestrate and automate Telco networking security functions and communicates with NSX core networking through a VIM layer. It provides CSPs and large enterprises the operational intelligence they need to holistically manage their complex multi-vendor virtual and physical environments, from the core to the edge to RAN in a single pane of glass, automated and consistent operation across Clouds. VMware NSX, core Telco component is powering VMware Telco Cloud Platform to enable telco-grade smart networking and security for modern 5G network.

VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance is an automated service assurance solution with fault management, performance management, service management, root cause analysis, and service impact analysis all-in-one platform. Putting all together, VMware Telco Cloud Platform helps CSPs deploy and manage Virtual Network Functions and Cloud-native Network Functions (VNFs and CNFs), reduce costs, enhance network security and automation while enabling new revenue-generating services for Telco customers.

VMware NSX: Integrated Layer 2 to Layer 7 Platform for Telco Networking and Security Services

At MWC 2023, the VMware Networking and Security team will demonstrate four key use cases for the VMware Telco Cloud Platform. Please join us at our virtual booth https://engage.vmware.com/mwc2023netsec

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Showcase 1 – Network Acceleration for 5G Workloads using SmartNIC for NSX

Networking and Security performance acceleration powered by Data Processing Units (DPUs) enables a telco-grade virtualized 5G infrastructure. VMware is announcing the General Availability of DPU-based acceleration for NSX with enhanced performance for Layer 2 to Layer 7 distributed firewalling and micro-segmentation. Offloading NSX Networking and Security services improve workload density on the servers and the performance of VNFs and CNFs that need high throughput, low latency connectivity, and security. This, in turn, allows telcos to achieve higher workload consolidation per host, improving overall server resource utilization while reducing energy consumption, reducing server footprint, and scaling better for 5G networks.

Showcase 2 – Telco Cloud Traffic Management for VNF/CNF with NSX ALB

The NSX Advanced Load Balancer is a software-defined load-balancing solution that provides high availability, scalability, and performance for 4G/5G cloud traffic. It provides a platform-agnostic load balancing solution that allows telco operators to publish VNFs and CNFs in a scalable and secure way. The NSX Advanced Load Balancer ensures that network traffic is distributed efficiently and securely across multiple instances of these functions in an automated way, providing telco-grade network reliability, scalability, security, and analytics.

Showcase 3 – CNF Container Networking with Antrea, NSX, and Service Mesh in Multi-Cloud Environment

VMware Telco Cloud Automation uses Antrea as default Container Network Interface (CNI) for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). To support CNF on VMware Telco Cloud Platform, Antrea provides a secure and scalable network solution. Antrea offers features such as network segmentation, security policy enforcement, and network performance optimization, allowing telcos to control network traffic flow and manage network security risks. NSX integration with Antrea enables network administrators to define networking and security policies for containers and VMs from within NSX Manager, offering a centralized pane-of-glass for visualizing and troubleshooting multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters. Antrea clusters can scale up with low convergence time and low resource utilization.

Showcase 4 – Multi-tenancy with NSX EVPN and IPv6 support

VMware NSX network virtualization platform implements Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) and IPv6 in a telco environment. EVPN provides virtualized layer 2 networking capabilities, allowing operators to create virtual LANs (VLANs) and virtual private networks (VPNs) in their data centers. NSX support for EVPN also includes advanced features such as multi-tenancy, network segmentation, and security policies – allowing you to create isolated virtual networks for each tenant that improves network security. It also supports 5G network slicing, helping CSPs design and operate the network as a set of logical networks on top of a shared infrastructure.

Combined with VMware Telco Cloud Automation, NSX VRF, multi-tenancy, EVPN and IPv6 support for each logical network can serve a defined business purpose with all the required network resources configured and connected end-to-end 5G network slicing.

Conclusion

VMware offers key technologies enabling service providers to build a 5G network and enforce security policies across the edge, data center core, and public cloud environments. For the latest updates, check out our microsite virtual booth in here at https://engage.vmware.com/mwc2023netsec

Here’s a recap of each use case and a quick preview of our demos at MWC in Barcelona.