does NSX replace the need of physical routers and switches?

[Osaidaz]

so few days ago I watched an introduction video about NSX, from what i understood, NSX has software define routers and switches

so we don't need physical routers and switches anymore? what's going to happen to companies like CISCO and Huwawi who make these hardware?

surely I miss understand something about NSX , not sure what !

[amolnjadhav]

Hi Osaidaz,

    I had same question 10 years back when virtual infrastructure came in the market "Now knows as vSphere", "Does ESX replace the need of Physical rack servers and blades?"

    but after 10 years what happened we are still using same Rack Servers/ Blades Servers but number of physical servers count reduced drastically because of virtualization.

    This same principle applies to VMware NSX, Number of Physical routers/Switches will be reduced because of NSX but we still required physical router/switch to connect to outside world "

Regards

Amol

[Sree]

Irrespective of the technology ,hardware and software will always coexist.For a technology like NSX for sure there is a huge advantage in data center virtualization.  However everyone will not make a drastic change in one shot. Every technology will be evaluated and based on the type of environment (Greenfield/BrownField) it would be easy or vice versa to implement . From NSX perspective there are absolutely no core network requirement and that is one main advantage (No vendor lock-in from physical networking perspective) . Based on the use case one might implement micro-segmentation in virtualised environment that doesn't mean we will throw way hardware security/firewall and keep the physical layer as a flat network :smileysilly: . End-To-End network security and network visibility is the top most priority for any environment and with NSX that missing puzzle is solved.