Juniper publishes vMX

This tweet from @JuniperNetworks has really inspired me yesterday. I liked Junipers Firefly Perimeter (vSRX) from the first day. I like the idea behind this product (yes, I like everything that can be run as a VM…). But yesterday Juniper has go one better.

Juniper Networks announced yesterday a virtualized and carrier-grade version of their MX Series 3D router. The Juniper Networks vMX is a virtual MX Series 3D Universal Edge Router and it’s optimized to run on x86 hardware. Juniper vMX can run on all major Hypervisors, including VMware ESXi and KVM. It was also mentioned, that vMX can be run in Docker containers or on bare-metal.

The development of vMX was relieved by Junipers acquisition of Contrail. Junipers physical MX series router is powered by Junipers Trio chipset and Juniper has virtualized their Trio chipset for vMX (now called vTrio). It was also optimized for x86 hardware. Depending on the number of physical resources, a vMX can achieve a throughput of 160 Gbps. vMX uses vTrio, Junos OS and supports the same feature set, so it feels and behaves like a physical MX series router. This ensures that customers can leverage their Juniper MX knowhow to run vMX in their environment. If a customer uses physical or virtual MX router is only a question of performance. Multiple vMX can be managed with Junos Space, Contrail SDN controller and OpenStack Cloud Manager. Customers will be able to buy vMX with beginning of Q1/2015 in a flexible license model (Pay-as-you-grow, perpetual or subscription license). Details about the pricing weren’t revealed by Juniper.

This short video was published by Juniper Networks and it’s available on YouTube.