NVDS and NSX-T in the Cloud Era

What they bring to the table and why they are important.

Switching and Routing in the cloud are hard to do.

With NSX-T it has its own Virtual switch called {NSX-T Managed Virtual Distributed Switch } aka NVDS.

NVDS is a little different than the traditional VDS { Virtual Distributed Switch } that comes as part of the Virtual Datacenter Platform like VSphere 6.5.

Traditional VDS is configured at the VCenter Server level with the configuration pushed to all ESXi Hosts associated with this switch. Something like global control and local execution.

VDS comes with 2 logical sections namely Management and Data planes. The management plane is the control structure you can use to configure the switch across all associated ESXi hosts.

Data plane lives locally on each ESXi host and help with tagging / switching sometimes this is also referred to as HPS { Host Proxy Switch }. HPS helps with the Uplink to the Physical network.

NVDS adds to the VDS concept.

NVDS is suited for both ESXi and KVM based hypervisors in the Cloud.

On ESXi hypervisors it is implemented by the VDS through the nsx-vSwitch software kernel module. You can see some…