What's New in NSX 6.2.3

VMware announced on June 9th, 2016 the new version of the NSX platform version 6.2.3. A minor release to their network virtualization platform.

The NSX solution is an innovative approach to solving long-standing network provisioning bottlenecks within the data center, and it allows for the integration of switching, routing and upper-layer services into an integrated application and network orchestration platform. With an overlay solution that may not require hardware upgrades, NSX offers customers a potentially quicker way of taking advantage of SDN capabilities by decoupling the network from hardware into a software abstraction layer allowing the end-user to programmatically create, provision and manage networks.

What's New

Networking and Edge Services

• Edge Firewall adds SYN flood protection: This protects vms from north-south SYN flood attacks and allows for increased security for public-facing workloads. This is disabled by default so you will need to use the NSX REST API to enable it.
• Edge On-Demand Failover: Allowing users to initiate an on-demand failover when needed.
• Edge Upgrade Behavior: Improved upgrade or redeploy with replacement NSX Edge VMs deployed before upgrade. Note the default value for TCP connection timeout is changed to 21600 seconds from the previous value of 3600 seconds to support this feature.
• Edge DHCP Pool Limits: Compact now 2048, Large 4096, Quad Large 4096 and X-Large 8192.

Security Services

• Distributed Firewall for TFTP ALG: (ALG), in addition to FTP, CIFS, ORACLE TNS, MS-RPC, SUN-RPC already present in 6.2.2.
• Guest Introspection: Now supports Windows 10.
• Service Composer Performance Improvements: Faster startup/reboot of NSX Manager by optimizing synchronization between security policy and firewall service.

Logical Switching and Routing

• Hardware Layer 2 Gateway Integration: Expands physical connectivity options by integrating 3rd-party hardware gateway switches into the NSX logical network. This can be used for integration of physical workloads into the NSX environment.
• VXLAN Port Changes: Port 4789 now in version 6.2.3 and later. The previous default VXLAN UDP port number was 8472.

Operations and Troubleshooting

• NSX Dashboards: Providing visibility into the overall health of NSX in one central view.
• SNMP Support: Configure SNMP traps for NSX events from NSX Manager, NSX Controller and Edge with support for SNMPv2c.
• Logging: Now enabled by default for SSL VPN and L2 VPN.

​Interoperability

• VMware vRealize Log Insight for NSX: Provides intelligent log analytics for NSX, with monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities and customizable dashboards for network virtualization, flow analysis and alerts. 

Licensing

• Change in default license & evaluation key distribution: The new default license "NSX for vShield Endpoint" enables use of NSX for deploying and managing vShield Endpoint for anti-virus offload capability only. vShield Manager is EOL in September of 2016 and it was previously not possible to use NSX Manager & Guest Introspection without normal NSX license before.

There are a lot more enhancement like:

• NSX Edge — Resource Reservation
• Cross VC NSX — Universal Distributed Logical Router (DLR) Upgrade
• Flexible SNAT / DNAT rule creation
• NSX Edge VM (ESG, DLR) now shows both Live Location and Desired Location
• Service Composer — Status Alarms
• Traceflow Enhancement — Network Introspection Services
• Firewall rules UI
• NSX Edge technical support logs
• Technical support bundle per host
• Central CLI for Host Health
• Central CLI for Packet Capture
• Customer Experience Improvement Program

​The release notes for NSX for vSphere 6.2.3 can be found here.