Brad Hedlund

Brad Hedlund is an Engineering Architect in the CTO office of VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit (NSBU). Brad’s background in data center networking begins in the mid-1990s with a variety of experience in roles such as IT customer, value added reseller, and vendor, including Cisco and Dell. Brad also authors a popular data center networking blog at http://bradhedlund.com. CCIE Emeritus #5530.

Recent Posts

Deploying VMware NSX with Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000

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VMware NSX network virtualization software makes it possible for IT organizations to obtain new levels of business agility, allowing you to deploy advanced policy based network services for your applications as quickly as a virtual machine, today, leveraging your existing physical network infrastructure or next generation network hardware from any vendor. Back in September, I Read more...

Distributed virtual and physical routing in VMware NSX for vSphere

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NOTE – this post originally appeared on Bradhedlund.com This post is intended to be a primer on the distributed routing in VMware NSX for vSphere, using a basic scenario of L3 forwarding between both virtual and physical subnets. I’m not going to bore you with all of the laborious details, just the stuff that matters for the purpose of this discussion. Read more...

VMware NSX, Convergence, and Reforming Operational Visibility for the SDDC

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Through convergence, VMware NSX will substantially reform operational visibility for the era of the software-defined data center Executive Summary Since the launch at VMworld 2013, much of the discussion about VMware NSX has been focused on its core properties of agile and fully automated network provisioning; the ability to create fully functional L2-L7 virtual networks Read more...

Seven reasons VMware NSX, Cisco UCS and Nexus are orders of magnitude more awesome together

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VMware NSX, Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus, TOGETHER solve many of the most pressing issues at the intersection of networking and virtualization. Executive Summary VMware NSX brings industry-leading network virtualization capabilities to Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus infrastructures, on any hypervisor, for any application, with any cloud management platform.  Adding state of the art virtual networking (VMware NSX) to Read more...

What is a Distributed Firewall?

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In the post “What is Network Virtualization?” I described a model where the application’s complete L2-L7 virtual network is decoupled from hardware and moved into a software abstraction layer for the express purpose of automation and business agility. In this post I’ll focus on network security, and describe an imminent firewall form factor enabled by Read more...

What Is Network Virtualization?

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This post originally appeared on bradhedlund.com, Brad is an experienced networking professional in VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit, specializing in network virtualization and data center fabrics. Data centers exist for the sole purpose to deploy applications. Applications that automate business processes, serve customers better, enter new markets … you get the idea. It’s all about Read more...