Book excerpt: Explore the foundational components of VMware NSX About This Book Install, manage, monitor and configure your NSX deployment. Understand VMware NSX's components and discover best practices to help you manage VMware NSX A step by step guide that will help you elevate your skills in deploying NSX to your environment Who This Book Is For The book is intended for network and system administrators that have hands on experience with VMware vSphere suite of products and would like to learn more about software defined networking and implementation of NSX. The readers are also expected to have basic networking knowledge and aware of basic switching and routing fundamentals. What You Will Learn Understand software-defined networks Deploy and configure VXLAN-enabled logical switches Secure your environment using Distributed Firewall and Data Security Configure third-party services in NSX Manage, configure, and deploy edge gateway services Perform various Edge operations including configuring CA certificates Explore the different monitoring options to check their traffic flow In Detail VMware NSX is a platform for the software-defined data center. It allows complex networking topologies to be deployed programmatically in seconds. SDNs allow ease of deployment, management, and automation in deploying and maintaining new networks while reducing and in some cases completely eliminating the need to deploy traditional networks. The book allows you a thorough understanding of implementing Software defined networks using VMware's NSX. You will come across the best practices for installing and configuring NSX to setup your environment. Then you will get a brief overview of the NSX Core Components NSX's basic architecture. Once you are familiar with everything, you will get to know how to deploy various NSX features. Furthermore, you will understand how to manage and monitor NSX and its associated services and features. In addition to this, you will also explore the best practices for NSX deployments. By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy Vmware NSX in your own environment with ease. This book can come handy if you are preparing for VMware NSX certification. Style and approach This is an easy-to-follow guide with tested configuration steps to get you up and running quickly. This book covers the nitty-gritty of installing, configuring, managing, and monitoring VMware NSX.