Yesterday VMware has released VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2. The new release improves the network efficiency, enhances security and delivers some operational enhancements.

What’s new in VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2:

Networking and Edge Services

  • Multicast Support:
    With NSX 6.4.2 the Logical Router can route IPv4 multicast traffic. With IGMP snooping in the NSX domain the location of the Virtual Machine multicast receiver could be identified by its hypervisor, Logical Switch and Virtual NIC. The ESG runs PIM sparsmode with physical routers and coordinates with the Distributed Logical Router (DLR) in order to provide both ways multicast connectivity from Virtual Machines to the outside world.
    For added multicast replication performance in the VXLAN Overlay, NSX leverages Layer 2 multicast in an underlying physical infrastructure running IGMP snooping.
  • Default Limit of MAC identifiers: 
    The default limit was increased from 2048 to 4096
  • Hardware VTEP:
    Added multi PTEP cluster capability to facilitate environments with multiple vCenters

Security Services

  • Context-Aware Firewall: 
    VMware added the following Layer 7 Application Context:
    • EPIC – Electronic medical records application
    • BLAST – VMware Horizon access protocol
    • MSSQL – Microsoft SQL Server 
  • Firewall Rule Hit Count: ​
    With the Rule Hit Count it is easy to find unused rules and clean-up your ruleset.
  • Firewall Section Locking:
    This features enables multiple security administrators to work concurrently on the firewall. You can lock rules and add a note why it is locked.
  • NSX Application Rule Manager: 
    Improved scale to 100 vNICs per session, further simplifying the process of creating security groups and whitelisting firewall rules for existing applications.
    Learn more about NSX Application Rule Manager: blogs.vmware.com

NSX User Interface

  • VMware NSX – Functionality Updates for vSphere Client (HTML)
    The following VMware NSX features are now available through the vSphere Client:
    • TraceFlow
    • User Domains
    • Audit Logs
    • Events & Tasks

For a list of supported functionality, please see:
VMware NSX for vSphere UI Plug-in Functionality in vSphere Client.

Operations and Troubleshooting

  • Authentication & Authorization:
    Introduces 2 new roles (Network Engineer and Security Engineer). Adds ability to enable/disable basic authentication.
  • NSX Scale Dashboard:
    Provides visibility into 25 new metrics. Adds ability to edit usage warning thresholds and filter for objects exceeding limits.
  • NSX Controller Cluster Settings:
    Specify common settings (DNS, NTP, Syslog) to apply to NSX Controller Cluster.
  • Support for VM Hardware version 11 for NSX components:
    For new installs of NSX 6.4.2, NSX appliances (Manager, Controller, Edge, Guest Introspection) are installed with VM HW version 11. For upgrades to NSX 6.4.2, please see Upgrade Notes for further details.

For more details on What’s New in VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4.2: