Welcome to the VMware NSX® product documentation.

Important: Starting with version 4.0, VMware NSX-T Data Center is known as VMware NSX.
Use the navigation on the left to browse the available NSX documentation including the API and CLI guides. To access the PDF format of NSX documentation, select a guide and click the icon.

VMware NSX provides an agile software-defined infrastructure to build cloud-native application environments. NSX focuses on providing networking, security, automation, and operational simplicity for emerging application frameworks and architectures that have heterogeneous endpoint environments and technology stacks. NSX supports cloud-native applications, bare metal workloads, public clouds, and multiple clouds.

NSX is designed for management, operation, and consumption by development organizations. NSX allows IT teams and development teams to select the technologies best suited for their applications.

Overview of NSX

NSX Installation

  • See the NSX Quick Start Guide to install NSX and quickly set up and validate a basic NSX deployment.
  • See the NSX Installation Guide for complete step-by-step installation and configuration instructions and suggested best practices for common installation workflows.

Additional Resources

The following table provides additional resources that can help you learn more about the NSX product, including the solutions NSX offers, its key features and benefits, the different NSX use cases, available hands-on labs, and more.

Resource Description
NSX Reference Design Guide

🔗HTML 📄PDF

This design guide targets virtualization and network architects interested in deploying NSX solutions. Chapters 2 through 6 explain the architectural building blocks of NSX as a full stack solution, providing a detail functioning of NSX components, features and scope. The design chapter (Chapter 7) offers guidance for a variety of factors including physical infrastructure considerations, compute node requirements, and variably sized environments from small to enterprise scale.
NSX Product Page Provides an overview and introduction of the NSX. Key features, benefits, use cases, customer stories and resources for NSX are featured here.
NSX Blog This page features articles under the headings of threat intelligence, modern network, VMworld, IDS/IPS, and firewalling. Trending topics such as service mesh are highlighted, and display all articles pertaining to the trending topic.
NSX Hands-on Labs (HOL) This catalog provides all the labs offered by VMware. You can search for labs, view lab details, and enroll in labs. Labs include NSX Getting Started, NSX Cloud Consistent Networking and Security across Enterprise, AWS & Azure Lightning Lab, and the VMware NSX Migration Coordinator.
NSX Training and Demo videos There are over 62 videos listed on the VMware NSX YouTube channel. Videos range from 5 to 20 minutes long, and cover a wide variety of topics such as micro-segmentation, NSX Edge bridge demo, and NSX cross cloud security. Subscribe to the channel to be kept up to date on new videos.
NSX Load Balancing Encyclopedia This document gives you a deep dive into NSX Load Balancing configuration and management. It lists all NSX LB capabilities (LB Deployment, Monitor, Server Pool, L4 VIP, L7-HTTP VIP, L7-HTTPS VIP, LB Rules, and Troubleshooting), with detailed examples for each.
NSX Multi-Location Design Guide This document provides details on the pros and cons of NSX’s multi-location solutions: Multisite and NSX Federation. It also offers a deep dive into the implementation strategies, and guidance on best practices for configuring network and security services in each solution.
VMware Skyline Protect your NSX Investment with VMware Skyline Today

VMware Skyline Advisor is a free, self-service, proactive support service that is available for all customers with a deployed VMware Product.

With Skyline Advisor, you can:

  • See potential risks in your environment and proactively resolve them before costly downtime occurs.
  • Understand product deployment and consumption.
  • Identify unprotected endpoints.
  • Maximize planned downtime with upgrade and interoperability recommendations.

Get started today. Set up and configuration typically takes 15-30 minutes.

For further information about VMware Skyline support for NSX, see VMware Skyline Now Supports NSX-T.

Additional NSX Application Platform Resources

The following table lists the additional resources that are available for the VMware NSX Application Platform.

Resource Description
VMware NSX® Intelligence™ and NSX Application Platform Deployment/POC Guide

This document provides details of the requirements and implementation of either a production deployment or a proof of concept (PoC) evaluation of NSX Intelligence version 3.2 or later that is released with VMware NSX.

This document covers the information you need to successfully deploy the NSX Application Platform (NAPP) and any NSX features that run on this platform. The document includes best practices information for deployment, common or well known issues, and troubleshooting steps.

VMware NSX Application Platform Automation Guide This document covers how to use the NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance to fully automate a NAPP deployment. The appliance includes the required microservices environment using a UI-based workflow that integrates directly into NSX Manager and only needs the required infrastructure to be provided (vSphere 7.0, compute, network and storage resources).
VMware NSX Application Platform Automation Appliance This is the virtual appliance (OVA) referenced in the VMware NSX Application Platform Automation Guide.
VMware NSX Application Platform Design Guidance for VMware Cloud Foundation Environments This document describes how to deploy and manage the NSX Application Platform in a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.5 or later environment.