VMware NSX Reviews

Open APIs allow seamless integration with other products. Eventhough Lastline does not provide an end-to-end solution like their rivals, namely McAfee, TrendMicro and Symantec, Lastline excels by providing their APIs so that they could be integrated with other security products.

With Lastline, the effort to put in into the protecting the users against zero-day threats and malware can be subsequently reduced. It's accuracy and analysis reports on the objects are what all the other vendors should make an example of.

Lastline's reports can sometimes be very complicated and somehow leaves users with lots of technical information that cannot be easily digested. A more presentable reporting should be provided. However, this is not a weakness and their reporting is only suitable for people with certain technical knowledge.

Lastline itself is a complicated product to navigate through, although it provides a lot of details to the users. This was a feedback from one of our customer here during the POC stage. Users may be required to be technically sound to understand what Lastline has provided to them. What I mean by "a more presentable reporting" is that Lastline should provide a more user readable format of the report; perhaps more visual storyline of their process?

I have been using and performing POC on Lastline for my customers for around 1 year.

No issues.

No stability issues.

Lastline has no issue with scalability as it is by far the more scalable amongst APT solutions.

Lastline support has yet to fully penetrate into the SEA market. Their responses may come from their Sales and System engineers instead of their support team.

As mentioned, their system engineers are very well trained and experience enough to answer most of the technical and product inquiries thrown at them.

No.

Initial setup is very straightforward for cloud-based deployment. For on-premise deployment, it will require some UNIX-based commands knowledge.

Lastline is not a cheap product if compared with their competitors. I wish they could do something about the pricing as it is very hard to convince the customers on such a model.

The full integration has been great. Its infrastructure and its ability to be part of the whole application are very useful for organizations. 

The solution is great for controlling virtual switches and it is easy to establish VLANs and micro-segmentations. All those things are very useful.

The stability is pretty good. 

Overall, for me, it's a good solution and has been working well. 

I cannot recall coming across any missing features. At this time, there is nothing I would need in a future release. 

Occasionally the licensing is not very clear. They should make it easier to understand. 

I have experience using the solution for around 25 years, on IT, however, for the last 10 years I've been working deeply on this and over the decade I have been more focused on software. In the last 4 or 5 years, I have had more and more focus. 

The stability is good. Our customers don't seem to have any issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

I haven't really dealt with scaling the solution. I can't speak to how it is. 

I've never been in contact with technical support in the past. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

I also have experience using Red Hat. However, sometimes I have had some problems with it. It can be a bit more difficult in terms of integration with other vendors. 

I didn't actually handle the implementation. I'm working more on the design side, not on setup or configuration. Therefore, I can't speak to how easy or difficult the implementation process is for users. 

The licensing is complex. Sometimes I have trouble understanding it.

We are VMware integrators and partners. 

I'd advise new or potential users to be aware that you will have to integrate it with other solutions. You'll need to look at how it fits in with all of your infrastructure, including IT infrastructure, for example. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's been very good overall. 

VMware NSX is used for micro-segmentation. If you have a virtual VMware pool, then you can segment them separately. It is similar to a firewall for virtual micro-segmentation.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

I have found the solution to be stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have never had to call technical support, the solution has been good.

We have done three installations and we have not had any critical issues. The time it took for the installation was approximately two days. However, they should provide better documentation.

We have two engineers that do the implementation and maintenance of the solution.

The solution is free and the price for the support can be expensive.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware NSX a five out of ten.

I was an intern at a relatively large company here in Morocco, and NSX is a great solution.

NSX has improved our organisation in many ways, by securing it with micro-segmentation, and by allowing us to implement logical equipment in a matter of seconds instead of waiting for the physical material to implement and configure.

The Distributed Firewall is simple to add to the network and rules are easy to implement on it.

It should be more adapted to the physical side of network topology in order to prevent unavailability.

Our main use case is the distributed firewall. NSX can segment every application and server based on the ports they need to communicate externally. Ports that aren't required are inactive, so we activate them for some specific applications. We can get the ports from the application guys, activate the ones we need, and then disable the rest of the ports. We've done other things with NSX, but it's just mostly about the distributed firewall.

We typically run a lot of vulnerability assessments — sometimes spam testing — and get a lot of bad results because some ports are open. I think NSX has significantly cut down on that. Right now, we have been able to fix almost all of our problems with unnecessary ports being opened and related issues. We are secure in this specific aspect, so we can log other options. 

NSX's stand-out function is the distributed firewall. The firewall system is just top-notch, and I haven't seen another solution like it. Aside from that, there are numerous other cases where NSX comes in handy. For example, we've done intrusion prevention and implemented some next-generation firewalls for service training. We deployed some next-generation firewalls inside certain servers. Then we could bring all the traffic down that was meant to lead each server to a specific firewall. The security guys put policies on the firewall for checking signatures and hash values to contain particular security breaches within the server and prevent them from affecting the network. So we could use the particular firewall that we usually use and use it within the server close-up at the data center instead of the VH. 

NSX could better integrate with open-source products. Of course, it integrates with some, but I know many people are uncomfortable deploying NSX with certain open-source solutions, such as Radar. They don't integrate so well, and the integration is usually so complex that many people would rather not use them.

I've been using VMware NSX personally for one year now, but I'm a consultant on this product, so I've deployed it for multiple customers.

We've experienced some bugs with NSX's user interface. For example, sometimes we click something, and it's not clicking. But they put out a lot of updates and patches. Also, they've added some particular boards on the applications. So with every update, they make the user interface more stable. 

You can scale NSX if you have the resources, but it's usually expensive and complex to scale up.

VMware support is great. I would rate their support eight out of 10.

The NSX setup is complex. That's one area where they could improve. Generally, it's too complicated to deploy. You can spend two or three days on it. And if you've never done it before, it might take a week. So it takes a relatively long time and lacks comprehensive end-to-end documentation. We had inadequate documentation when we implemented it, but I think it's better now. Total deployment for us took more than two weeks, but there were some breaks in that time where we stopped working on it. We weren't under any deadline. If we were pressed, we could have finished in four or five.

After the initial setup, NSX doesn't require a whole lot of maintenance. It's mostly troubleshooting, checking error codes, etc. There is no dedicated maintenance personnel specifically for NSX. Some guys in the IT department support this solution along with several other solutions. We have about four to five people handling that side of things, but there are six of us in the whole department responsible for infrastructure.

It's hard to judge with new deployments because you need some time to start seeing a return. But after someone has had one or two years to achieve a mature deployment on the product, they'll generally be happy that they spent the money. After a year, I'm beginning to see the return on investment, but everyone would argue that it's still expensive for the first two or three months.

VMware NSX is expensive.

I rate VMware NSX seven out of 10. If you are considering NSX, I suggest that you practice the deployment and know your use case. Know what you want to do with it and understand why you want to use the product. Identify the security features you want to use and consider what it's doing for your infrastructure. We're still exploring the features. I'm not sure we're using all the features that come with the application. There are so many that we have not used. For now, we're looking at more use cases and expanding on that knowledge.

Some of the key features I find most valuable are the highly graphical user interface, virtualization of networks, and Microsoft application compatibility. It has all the functionality that we require.

One drawback is this solution requires a lot of other products in the VMware ecosystem to have a full end-to-end operation orchestration monitoring. You have to buy a lot of add-ons to fully utilize the functionality.

Some additional features in the next release could be for the solution to be more directed toward the end-to-end functions, from physical to virtual monitoring. It should also include streamlined troubleshooting of our operation. 

I have used the solution for approximately two years.

The solution has been stable.

I have found the solution to be highly scalable.

The experience we have had with the solutions technical support has been wonderful.

The setup was straightforward and it took a few weeks.

I would recommend the solution. I would like to point out this is a vendor-lock-in solution, where the user might be confined to a certain vendor for some time before they can move on adopting other vendors. 

I rate VMware NSX an eight out of ten. 

We use it for microsegmentation, and it has performed well.

We use this in combination with VMware Horizon View. With Horizon, we have an isolated environment.

The most valuable feature is to control application behavior.

It provides us with features that other products have not.

If you start with a new or greenfield environment, it is okay to implement. However, if there are other solutions already in place, it can be difficult to implement.

The stability is very good.

Because it is in the VMkernel, it is robust.

I have no contact at the moment with VMware support about NSX.

It is easy to implement it.

I am the partner. I work with the customer to do the deployment.

I would recommend it to another person.

We do not integrate it with vCloud Director.

I don't use load balancer at the moment.

My company's primary use case for this solution is the microsegmentation. It's futuristic.

VMware NSX has improved our organization in the way that we can now deploy many VMs faster than before and so we are scaling up much faster.

We like that NSX is faster. My colleagues manage their own firewalls so they can freely deploy their VMs. The ability to freely deploy is one of the most valuable features. 

This solution is robust and agile. It was stable for one year, there was no impact. In the last two months, we had two big incidents.

We are happy with the scalability.

We have needed to use their technical support. We've have had good and bad experiences with them. We don't always find them to be so impactful. Sometimes the support guy isn't so on top of resolving the issue and it can take a while to sort out. 

It was deployed by a VMware consultant. 

I would tell people who say that NSX is complex that it's not as complex as they think and they should definitely consider this solution.

I would have rated this solution a nine, but in the last two months, we have had two incidents with them.