The VMware vDefend architecture requires different foundational components depending on the level of security you are deploying.

Basic stateful firewalling (Distributed Firewall - E, and Gateway Firewall - F) is handled natively by the core NSX Manager and ESXi hypervisor kernel without requiring extra platforms.

However, the Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP) suite requires immense computational power for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and dynamic file sandboxing. To offload this heavy processing from the ESXi hosts, VMware utilizes the Security Services Platform (SSP) (often delivered as a cloud-hosted service or via the on-prem NSX Application Platform). SSP is explicitly required to power the advanced correlation and analysis engines behind Network Detection and Response (NDR) , Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) , and Malware Protection/Sandboxing .

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