VSX = Virtual Switching Extension
Enterprise networks face the heavy challenge of delivering 24x7 always-on mobility, reliable real-time access to collaboration and cloud-based services, and securely supporting increasing numbers of IoT devices. As the business and network grows, this non-stop availability becomes more critical due to the simple economics that any amount of downtime leads to losses in productivity, user satisfaction and business revenue. The campus core switch sits at the heart of the network and therefore is key to delivery of a high availability solution that’s capable of ensuring always-on access with robust performance and of preventing network failures and outages.
High availability (HA) is especially important and relevant in the core of the campus network. Aruba’s new high availability technology developed specifically for the campus core and aggregation is VSX.
Designed using the best features of existing HA technologies such as Multi-chassis Link Aggregation (MC-LAG) and Virtual Switching Framework (VSF), VSX enables a distributed and redundant architecture that is highly available during upgrades inherently by architecture design. High availability is delivered through redundancy gained by deploying two chassis in the core with each chassis maintaining its independent control yet staying synchronizing information via the ArubaOS-CX unique database architecture. Hence the name Virtual Switching in ArubaOS-CX, VSX.