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Everything You Need to Know About NSX V2T Migration - Course Monster Blog

Written by Marbenz Antonio | 19/05/2022 5:35:43 AM

Today’s businesses are being transformed by software. Modern apps are making a significant contribution to company innovation, transformation, and faster service delivery. Modern business models demand dynamic apps that are spread across various clouds. Apps must be adaptable to diverse computing platforms, such as containers, virtual machines, and bare metal. Contemporary network architecture is necessary to assure connection and stability across various clouds to enable these modern apps. Networks must be scalable and adaptable, while still providing an excellent end-user application experience.

VMware has introduced a new version of NSX designed with contemporary apps and end-to-end security in mind to help enterprises build a network optimized for modern apps. Customers may use NSX Data Center (NSX-T) to take advantage of enhanced networking and security features to enable new business models and various use cases. By transitioning to NSX-T, existing VMware NSX for vSphere (NSX-V) users may realize increased business agility and higher network and application performance. Customers are advised to move to NSX-T in addition to the additional capabilities, as NSX-V passed End of General Support (EOS) in January 2022 and will reach End of Technical Support (ETS) in January 2023. Customers must act fast while migrating from NSX-V to NSX-T. This article will examine the NSX-V to NSX-T migration use case, advantages, difficulties, and customer journey, as well as how VMware Professional Services’ data center migration services may help you along the process.

Reasons to migrate from NSX-V to NSX-T

NSX-T was designed with current network requirements in mind. VMware NSX-T was developed from the bottom up for the hybrid cloud, to ensure networks can manage changes in application landscapes and security needs. A goal was also to protect against developing sophisticated network security attacks. NSX-T is designed to provide networking, security, automation, and operational simplicity for new application frameworks and architectures with diverse endpoint environments and technology stacks.

Cloud-native apps, bare-metal workloads, multi-hypervisor setups, public clouds, and many clouds are all supported by NSX-T Data Center. NSX-T is a software-defined infrastructure that enables the creation of cloud-native application environments. The NSX-T Data Center is intended for development companies to manage, operate, and consume. The NSX-T Data Center enables IT and development teams to choose the technologies that are most suited to their applications.

Among the many advantages of the NSX-T are the following:

Challenges with NSX-T adoption

The NSX-T is not the same as the NSX-V. As a result, transitioning from NSX-V to NSX-T is more complicated than just applying a patch or performing a small update. To properly relocate, network managers must first carefully assess their present network.

The following are the most typical customer migration issues:

  • Examining the present network structure and security services
  • Increasing awareness of network and security difficulties and interdependence
  • Developing and establishing a Migration Strategy.
  • Choosing an upgrade sequencing and execution plan
  • Keeping track of a large number of setups and workloads
  • Multiple distributed firewall rules are being migrated.
  • reducing downtime and data loss
  • Keeping data secure during and after transfer
  • determining the resources and timeline for planning and carrying out the move
  • Developing the necessary skills and knowledge
  • Validating the best migration path and how to carry it out
  • Using the appropriate automation tools
  • After-migration integration of current third-party goods and services

The migration journey

Migrating from NSX-V to NSX-T (NSX V2T) does not have to be difficult, but it should not be handled lightly. A network must be thoroughly examined to ensure that the necessary hardware and configuration are in place to handle the newly deployed NSX-T workloads. As with most things in networking, a little strategy may go a long way to ensuring a project’s long-term success. VMware Professional Services can assist you with your move.

Organizations that work with VMware Professional Services and our Master Services Competencies (MSC) partners begin their migration with an NSX V2T Migration Assessment Service. This transition evaluation analyses the current VMware NSX-V deployment and identifies the intended VMware NSX-T state for the future. The goal of this service is to evaluate the customer’s environment, identify preparedness for the migration path, offer a high-level overview of needs, and design the process flow.

VMware Professional Services will examine critical parameters and features in your present VMware NSX-V architecture, such as the following:

  • The number of data centers/sites and the number of hosts
  • Container networking services, contemporary applications, cloud-native apps
  • Security services, distributed firewalling, micro-segmentation, IDS-IPS, and NDR are all examples of security services.
  • VMware goods and applications are installed (e.g., vRealize Automation, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud Director, VMware Integrated OpenStack)
  • Products and services from third parties
  • NAT (network address translation), BGP (border gateway protocol), OSPF (open shortest path first), static routing, load balancing, north-south/east-west firewall rules, and current network topologies are examples of features in use.

The VMware Professional Services team will go over the relevant use cases for your network deployments, such as Kubernetes and container networking support, networking and security automation, network detection and response against advanced threats, centralized policy management, securing VDI (virtualized desktop infrastructure), disaster recovery, micro-segmentation, IDS/IPS, moving workloads to/from the public cloud, networking and security analytics, and so on.

The Evaluation Service is given in three stages:

  1. Discovery. Obtaining critical information about your network and work environment
  2. Planning and analysis Evaluating current policies to determine what needs to be migrated and the best method for doing so
  3. Assessment summary report A paper describing the previous two processes and recommending a migration strategy

After you have completed the NSX V2T Migration Assessment Service, you will obtain a detailed list of:

  • Gathered network and security information from the surroundings
  • Migration needs and possible risks
  • Hardware expansion plans that are recommended (if required)
  • Recommendation for a migration approach
  • Recommendations for tooling-supported feature migration
  • Tooling recommendations for unsupported features
  • Workload migration recommendations

Based on the evaluation results, VMware Professional Services will sit down with you to plan and discuss several NSX-V to NSX-T migration approaches: coexist, in-place, or lift-and-shift. View our full NSX-T Data Center Migration Guide for a detailed overview of these many migration methodologies and tools available for migration. Whatever migration approach you pick, the following high-level stages are required:

  • Examine the changes between the NSX-V and the new NSX-T environments.
  • Create and assess a migration strategy and a rollback plan.
  • To migrate, review workloads, firewall rules, and load balancing setup.
  • Create and deploy an NSX-T environment.
  • Import current NSX-V setup
  • Configuration and network topology should be applied to the NSX-T target environment.
  • Integrate VMware with third-party systems.
  • Cutover must be tested and validated.
  • tidy up (delete and remove old configurations)
  • Exchange of information

There are a number of alternative NSX-V to NSX-T migration engagement models you may use depending on how you want to continue with your migration:

  • Customer-led and executed: You can use the Migration Coordinator Tool and/or VMware NSX Migration for VMware Cloud Director with this approach to migrate from NSX-V to NSX-T in a VMware Cloud Director environment without requiring VMware assistance on the actual migration, but you can get VMware Technical support on any tools you use. If you choose this strategy, it is highly advised that you have NSX-V to NSX-T migration training (for more information on VMware training and certification, see VMware Learning) as well as high-level networking and security skills.
  • Engaging VMware Professional Services and our Master Services Competencies (MSC) partners: For further information on the NSX-V to NSX-T Migration Professional Services Offering, please contact your VMware sales representative. Our service offering offers a variety of NSX-V to NSX-T services to help our clients along the way.

When you work with VMware Professional Service and MSC partners, you know you’re getting:

  • A tried-and-true migration process based on VMware best practices.
  • Complete migration and rollback strategy that includes the degree of work, potential dangers, and before and post-migration tasks.
  • A unified migration deployment across different datacenters/locations.
  • A successful and as frictionless transfer of existing workloads is feasible.
  • Existing load balancers can be migrated quickly and securely.
  • Existing policies and firewall rules were successfully migrated.
  • Risk and complexity have been reduced.
  • Migration periods are shorter.
  • Information transmission is now complete.

 

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