VMware NSX Reviews

We host citizen-centric portals. They are web portals where citizens can enter and fetch data. For example, we have tax-related portals, health-related portals, and education-related portals. These are social welfare portals, and for that, we use AWS services.

NSX helps us by making IT management and operations more efficient. When VMs spin off from the DC to the DR site, all required settings on the network level are handled automatically.

The most valuable feature of NSX is the ease of configuration. It handles automatic configuration of IP addresses and network settings during VM migrations between data centers.

The ticket support response time from VMware could be improved. Often, callbacks are delayed, which can be problematic if the servers are in production.

We have been using NSX for almost one year.

NSX is stable and reliable. I would rate its stability between eight or nine out of ten.

NSX is quite scalable. I would rate its scalability as eight out of ten.

The customer support from VMware could be more responsive, as sometimes callbacks are delayed, causing delays in addressing critical issues.

Positive

We did not switch from another solution to NSX. We have been using VMware products, including vSphere, for many years.

The initial setup of NSX was complex, but with the help of an experienced vendor and support from VMware, we managed to configure it successfully in a short time.

We had an experienced vendor help with the implementation and received good support from VMware during the setup.

VMware has moved to a bundled pricing model, which means we are sometimes forced to pay for features we don’t use. This has increased our overall costs.

We evaluated Azure and other solutions, but we preferred AWS.

I recommend NSX because it simplifies IT operations and management, especially for data center network configurations.

VMware NSX helps create and operate on-demand networks. The solution is dynamic and flexible. Our company's principal use case for the product is to provide a network for private projects. VMware NSX is also used to link virtual networks with legal networks and develop a single environment that permits comprehending virtual and physical tasks. 

Firewall security is one of VMware NSX's vital features. Using the tags and the solution's security policy is incredibly simple. For instance, I can create a sketch on paper and redesign it with the tags present on the network segment using VMware NSX. 

A basic load balancer feature was present in a previous version, but the latest version only has an advanced load balancer. The vendor should integrate a basic load balancer in future versions. The advanced load balancer is mostly suitable for system integrators, but it is not usable for our company dimensions. 

I have been using VMware NSX for three years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. There are about a few hundred end-users of the solution in our organization. 

Our organization's virtual environments consist of virtual machines and systems within the network segments of VMware NSX, and every lab has professors, researchers, and students. 

Before Broadcom acquired VMware NSX, I would rate the tech support a nine out of ten. But presently, I wouldn't rate it so high because our company has difficulty reaching customer support. Whenever I write an email to the technical manager of the solution, I often don't receive a response. 

Overall, the setup process of VMware NSX was easy, but due to the unfamiliarity, the beginning of the process was a steep climb for our organization's team. In our company, we majorly utilize the on-prem deployment model but temporarily we also used the solution in the cloud because we needed the virtual labs and sometimes we needed to use VMware NSX on Azure. 

As a public administrator in Italy, our company signs a contract with an organization connected to numerous universities. This aforementioned organization creates the tender with VMware. I would rate the pricing of VMware NSX as seven out of ten. 

The micro-segmentation function of VMware NSX is wonderful because this feature allows for the best control of every single entrance point of data packets. I would overall rate VMware NSX a nine out of ten. I would recommend others to use the solution. 

I used to sell the solution as a bundled package. My role was to find the best solutions for customers from various vendors and work with our pre-sales and solution architecture departments to present these options. I provided high-level advice and my colleagues provided technical details. 

Our customers used the solution for segmentation and automation to secure workloads in their lower computing layer. One customer was CaixaBank, an important financial institution in Spain. 

The dashboard is comprehensive and easy to use. 

The solution integrates perfectly with F5, Check Point, and other applications. Integration with vendors is very important for customers. For our CaixaBank deployment, the solution performed these integrations which included defining, automating, and applying different rules and security functionalities. 

The solution is only sold as part of a bundle and not as an individual product. Some customers only need vSphere or NSX for their use cases, but account executives focus on bundles so this is a problem. 

Account executives need to talk with both systems and security staff to get a full picture of the environment's requirements. For example, systems staff have no need for the solution so they will never deploy it. 

I have been familiar with the solution for three years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The solution is scalable and can handle deployment to thousands of devices with no issues. 

Technical support is very, very good. Staff work hard to understand new functionalities or bug fixes that are released monthly. 

The setup depends on the project scope. For example, CaixaBank's project had a very large scope that was divided into many different parts. Deployment took one year but the project is still ongoing. 

Good deployments depend on an assessment phase where you talk with different departments before defining objectives. Discussions should occur both with systems and security staff. With proper pre-assessment, the solution operates and integrates perfectly. 

The pricing is higher than other options from Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Cisco because it is sold in a bundle. 

Customers do not know the individual price of the solution so they compare the package pricing to competitors. The solution should offer stand-alone pricing so it can be accurately compared to other options. 

There are many solutions in the market that offer similar functionality and characteristics. 

Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Cisco offer lower prices because they are considered legacy. Segmentation is very detailed so many customers prefer legacy options for peace of mind. 

The solution is a very, very good product that is perfect for customers who have good technical support. 

I recommend the solution and rate it a seven out of ten.

The most valuable feature of VMware NSX is the load balancing and routing of firewall rules. Many of the features are beneficial.

I have been using VMware NSX for approximately four years.

VMware NSX can be stable. However, before you start, you need a very thorough sturdy design. Once this is complete you can go on building your VMware NSX in your environment. 

I went to VMware to look at their best practice designs, but they didn't apply to our environment. I had to take some parts of different designs and build my own that was exactly what was right for us.

Get the designs first, study them very thoroughly and after that, you can implement what will work for you.

The scalability of VMware NSX is very good. However, you have to take into consideration that you have to study their documentation.

The amount of users or devices VMware NSX  can handle depends on the resource that you allocate to the Edges and to the management cluster. They are small, medium, and large. A large allocation can handle thousands of virtual machines. We mostly deploy medium to large-scale systems.

The support from VMware NSX could improve. We are a large company and when we have an issue we do not need to waste everyone's time with level one and two support. I try and explain to them I need level three support but they say they have to follow protocol and pass me through the different levels.   

I have used previously Cisco 1000V. It was much more expensive than VMware NSX. We cannot compare them because the Cisco 1000V is obsolete and I don't know if they have a newer version or something similar. They are not the same technology, Cisco 1000V is from 2015, and NSX-T is from 2021. There is a big difference between time and technology.

If you have experience with the setup of VMware NSX it is simple, but if you do not it could be difficult. I would advise new users to contact professional support from VMware.

The price of VMware NSX is reasonable.

I rate VMware NSX a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is the microsegmentation of all our infrastructure, which is a huge bonus. It's performed well.

The microsegmentation allows me to sleep at night. My job is reducing risk, plugging security holes, and working with the automated layer security. Even if somebody spins up a new server, it has to have a tag in NSX. Therefore, all the security rules are already applied across the infrastructure or automatically applied to new machines. It doesn't generate any new security holes if people have new products. It gives peace of mind that project managers are not screwing up my entire security posture.

Automation, because we're constantly onboarding massive customers. We have our own management system, which integrates nicely with NSX. Therefore, we've built an automation layer so we can deploy and completely secure new customers in a hosted environment within a couple of minutes.

Microsegmentation is incredible. It's the only way to go for managing networks long-term.

The security benefit has been huge.

I would like to have automating reporting built into common service management platforms, such as JIRA, Serviceaide, and ServiceNow. 

The stability has been great. I have had no problems with it. It is a robust solution.

We manage a huge infrastructure, and it has not been a problem for us. It has caused no issues.

We generally load balance with separate hardware. With the normal traffic that we see between virtual machines, they never leave the host. So, there are no real issues there. We will use separate, dedicated hardware, because we are at such a scale that our customers prefer to have separate load balances in the hardware.

We jumped onboard with NSX right when it started. VMware worked with us when we had issues or made suggestions to the point that we were invited as a partner to 2016 VM World, because we contributed so heavily into NSX. It has been nice to see the things our potential pain points that we were having with NSX at the time be implemented into the product. Now, it's just seamless, which is great.

We just bought it off the shelf and implement it ourselves.

We have saved man-hours and decreased our security exposure.

We haven't had to hire a dedicated network engineer because NSX handles 90 percent of it. The reduced overhead in terms of managing networks has been the biggest plus. 

We haven't had to buy additional switching capacity.

Get it in your environment as soon as possible.

Network segmentation is hard. A lot of businesses still use the traditional three-tier system, because it has been proven, but it isn't particularly robust or secure. Realistically, it's a natural step in terms of network management to move to micro-segmentation. It just makes sense.

If someone is worried that the solution is too complex, they should hire people with experience.

The solution is a software-defined firewall. You can set the policies and filter the incoming traffic from our site to our network. Any hostile request coming from an external network will get blocked. 

The most valuable and unique feature of the solution is Micro-segmentation achieving better security, through enabling security architects to divide data centre into different segments. One being the VMS withing the on-premises, the other one on the Cloud.

There could be an improvement in regards to security. This solution cannot migrate all assets smoothly and continuously, for example, the host

Sometimes the physical hosts are not able to be converted into virtual ones, which needs to be fixed. 

I have been using the solution since 2012.

We have many users in our organization. There are approximately 50 administration and more than 300 users using this solution.

We also use NSX-T alongside this solution. NSX started with micro-segmentation and the other option is based on a different architecture with some differences.

The installation is straightforward, it took a couple of hours.

The deployment happened base on the deployment topology that is defined by the security architect. I did the deployment by myself. 

This solution requires a licence. 

I have used other firewalls in the past. 

I recommend this solution and I am going to continue using it in the future.

I rate VMware NSX a nine out of ten. 

We use the product for disaster recovery purposes. It helps us expand the network and security for workloads running inside the environment. In the cloud, specifically with Azure VMware Solution or AWS, VMware NSX provides protection-related capabilities.

Regarding network management, it enables the ease of creating a network configuration for any application.

The product has valuable features for security and network extension. We can secure customer environments by effectively managing and securing traffic and facilitating seamless network extension. We can address challenges related to workload migration, where we often need to relocate workloads between environments due to changes in licensing or applications. The DFW, i.e., Distributed Firewall, is the most beneficial feature for network security and micro-segmentation.

The network-extending capabilities for the physical environment need improvement. Instead of virtualization, the ability to add physical servers to the network could be enhanced.

We have been using VMware NSX since 2018. We have worked with different versions depending on the customer's requirements. We are working with the latest version as well.

It is a stable platform.

We have medium to enterprise-level customers for VMware NSX. Regarding scalability, we can add new nodes or servers to the cluster. It automatically extends in a horizontal scale-out approach when the nodes are added.

I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

We open a case and await the engineer's reply on escalation. It is a process similar to that of other vendors.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. The implementation time ranges from days to weeks, depending on the business use cases per customer requirements. It involves the assessment of design, deploying, and verifying the same. I rate the process an eight out of ten.

The product pricing ranges from medium to expensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten.

VMware NSX has played a significant role in supporting your organization's efforts in automated network provisioning and creating multi-tenant networks, especially when integrated with vRealize Automation or other automation tools. We were able to create an automated orchestrated workload and manage IP assignments.

I rate the product a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution in order to build a private cloud.

I'm not using it directly. Basically, for me, this is just another tool in the portfolio. I'm not the engineering staff that are next to the console and doing configurations.

Overall, I would say the solution has been quite stable.

The solution is likely scalable.

I haven't heard of any problems with the solution.

Any technical product has its own limitations in one place or another.

Our technical team is always looking for the solutions that they work with to offer more convenient integrations.

I've been using the solution for around a year or so. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

There are some limitations in terms of scaling. It depends on how you would like to scale. Our engineers are using it and they don't see any problems with the scaling, however, it doesn't mean the same will work for any other organization.

Currently, we have more than 10,000 end-users. Our technical team isn't really that big. However, I can't say the exact number.

We do plan to continue to use the solution, however, we don't have plans for any big expansion.

I do not have any personal experience with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful, knowledgeable, or responsive they are.

I cannot say if there was a different solution used in our organization. It had been implemented before I arrived.

I didn't handle the initial installation. I can't speak to how easy or difficult it was to implement, or how long it took to deploy. I wasn't a part of the process.

I'm not involved in the licensing process at all. I have no knowledge of how long our licenses last or how much it costs the company.

We are just a customer and end-user. We don't have a business relationship with VMware.

We use a few different VMware products, not just NSX.

We aren't necessarily using the latest version of the solution. We usually use the latest minus one or two versions.

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been mostly quite please with it.