Some days ago VMware released NSX 6.2. NSX 6.2 + vSphere 6.0 support Cross vCenter NSX. It means that you can deploy logical switches (LS), distributed logical routers (DLR) and distributed firewalls (DFW) across multiple vCenters.
Yesterday when I was reading about new features in VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 6.1 I found out that SRM 6.1 supports Universal Logical Switch (ULS) - available in NSX 6.2.
Universal Logical Switch allows for the creation of layer-2 networks that span vCenter servers. It's very useful not only for SRM (no manual network mapping between the protected and recovery sites) but also for having consistent configuration across vCenters. With other cool new features such as:
- Cross vCenter vMotion with DFW - VMs that have policies defined in the "Universal" sections can be moved across hosts that belong to different vCenters with consistent security policy enforcement.
- Consistent firewall policy across multiple vCenters - Firewall Rule Sections in NSX can be marked as "Universal" whereby the rules defined in these sections get replicated across multiple NSX managers.
- Universal Distributed Logical Router (UDLR) - allows creation of distributed logical routers that can span multiple vCenters. You need to deploy it to enable routing across the universal logical switches.
we can get the following benefits:
- vMotion across vCenter Servers without having to reconfigure the VM or change firewall rules.
- Centralized management of universal objects and
- Disaster recovery capabilities (as mentioned earlier SRM 6.1).
There are some other features:
- Support VIP and pool port range - load balancer supports applications that require a range of ports.
- Support for vSphere 6.0 Platform Services Controller topologies - NSX now supports external Platform Services Controllers (PSC), in addition to the already supported embedded PSC configurations. Now, you can deploy a highly available PSC as well.
- Ability to keep VLAN tags over VXLAN.
and more.
Now it's time to upgrade NSX in my lab and play with NSX 6.2 new features and later test integration with SRM 6.1 😉