What’s New in VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2

by Davoud Teimouri · Published 22/08/2018 · Updated 04/04/2019

What’s New in VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2

New version of NSX has been introduced by VMware and NSX for vSphere is now known as NSX Data Center for vSphere. VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2 adds usability and serviceability enhancements, and addresses a number of specific bugs.

Networking and Edge Services

Multicast Support: Adds ability to configure L3 IPv4 multicast on Distributed Logical Router and Edge Service Gateway through support of IGMPv2 and PIM Sparse Mode.
Default Limit of MAC identifiers: Increases from 2048 to 4096
Hardware VTEP: Added multi PTEP cluster capability to facilitate environments with multiple vCenters

Security Services

Context-Aware Firewall: Additional Layer 7 Application Context Support (EPIC, MSSQL, BLAST AppIDs)
Firewall Rule Hit Count: Monitor rule usage and easily identify unused rules for clean-up
Firewall Section Locking: Enables multiple security administrators to work concurrently on the firewall
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.

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.

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.