VMware NSX Reviews

I primarily use the product as network virtualization software.

VMware NSX is a great product for network virtualization. No other vendor can offer this kind of solution up until now, and it's great for enhancing security at the virtual machine level. There is micro-segmentation, and a distributed firewall, and all network and network security components can be virtualized with the help of this NSX-T stack. It is a pioneer software solution for network security in a virtualized environment.

This solution comes with an API that can easily integrate with other solutions. 

NSX features include micro-segmentation, distributed IPS, IDS functionality, URL analysis, gateway firewall, logical routing, and all the staple networking solutions like DNS, DSCP, and routing. All these features are very interesting.

The solution is stable.

We can scale it if we need to.

It should support Hyper-V also. Nowadays, NSX supports the KVM and ESXi hypervisors only. It should also support Hyper-V and Citrix hypervisors.

There have already been lots of improvements. For example, they edited the intelligent plans and added an advanced load balancer. The latest version, 4.0, really has all the features you need.

It's a bit complex to set up the product.

I have a total of around three years of experience using the NSX-T solution. 

The stability is good architecture-wise. We haven't had any issues. 

The solution can scale well. 

It is not a user-based solution. We deploy it to about 20 servers. 

We did not previously use a different solution before this product.

It is a little bit complex to set up. It depends upon deployment. Either it is greenfield or brownfield deployment. If it is greenfield, it is very easy. If it is a brownfield deployment, so you need to take care of multiple scenarios of your network, and you need to understand the network architecture, then the deployment of services. 

While deployment requires a complete team, maintenance only requires on VMware administrator. 

We handled the initial setup with the help of a third-party SI team.

This product provides end-to-end visibility and security to your virtual environment. So it's a very huge return on investment in terms of security enhancement and maintaining cybersecurity posture.

The cost of the solution is moderate. I'd rate it three out of five in terms of affordability.

There is no other option available for this kind of product.

The product should be implemented in any IT infrastructure virtual environment. It is a must-have.

I'd rate it a ten out of ten.

The solution is used for network virtualization. Normally, in my cases, I was billing it for the government clouds, for NIC, the National Informatics Computer of India. For them, I was making a cloud where a different government, a smaller government entity, wanted to buy a cloud from the government clouds.

Apart from the normal functionality, a few things are quite useful, including multi-cloud networking. They have container networking and load balancing. Those are quite useful in terms of when we are designing a solution.

It's a pretty mature platform right now. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

We found the solution to be stable. 

It's scalable. 

I haven't found any shortcomings. 

It might be nice to have more AI in the future. It would help keep us from redesigning every time. 

I've worked with the solution for four years now. 

The solution is stable and perfectly fine. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution can scale well. 

We had a user base of around 1200 people.

I dealt with tech support during pre-deployment, and they were fine. They were helpful when we were dealing with staging cases. I wasn't an active part of the actual deployment and can't speak of how helpful they were in that part of the process. 

I was the previous architect for the NSX, not the implementer.

My understanding is the setup process is quite straightforward. 

Our deployment was quite big. Including the staging and all the stuff, we were able to deploy in a four-month timeframe. That is not only NSX, that is the complete deployment of the cloud. We had a few issues here and there, however, overall, it was fine. 

It's easy to maintain for the most part. The orchestration layer for it was a bit hectic work for us. That needed a dedicated VMware team. Apart from that, everything was quite smooth for NSX or vSphere, et cetera, and it is quite simple to manage it.

The finance team handles the licensing agreements. I can't speak to the exact cost.

When going for multiple OEM solutions, like Juniper, Cisco, HPE, et cetera, NSX will be quite useful. Don't go for the ACSIs and all Juniper proprietary options since future upgrades will be a bit tough if something needs to be added. Therefore, if it is a multiple OEM architecture, go for NSX, it'll be more helpful.

I'd rate the solution eight 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.

NSX is under the platform. NSX is used on a cloud-only platform for clients.

The solution works well overall and we are happy with it.

We enjoy the micro-segmentation and the ability to extend the network on Layer Two.

It is stable. 

The solution can scale well. 

We have found the UI to be very good. The interface is intuitive enough.

It offers good documentation. 

I'm not sure where the solution can be improved. 

We did recently need a patch to deal with an outage on NSX.

The price is rather high.

We've been using the solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. We have just had an issue that caused an outage of some of our NSX. However, now it's okay. VMware gave us a patch to correct it.

It is a scalable product. It's not a problem.

There are about 3,000 VMs on our data center. There are a lot of customers.

When we had an issue recently, VMware asked to upgrade to a high level of support to correct the problem.

The initial setup offers an average level of complexity. It's neither too difficult or too hard. 

I'm a system engineer, so I don't know exactly what the price is. However, I am aware that it's high. It's better suited to larger enterprises.

We are service providers and partners.

I'd rate the product eight out of ten.

It is for internal networking. Basically, we will be migrating the workloads to the cloud vCenter, and to manage those workloads, networking is required, which is called NSX in the VMware environment.

It provides a single pane of glass. You can do the switching, routing, load balancing, IPS, IDS, etc. Everything is under one umbrella. So, there is no vendor dependency over there.

They have some limitations in the firewall features as compared to the on-prem or dedicated hardware appliance. They can add more features, such as IPS and IDS, to the cloud firewall.

I have been using this solution for the last seven to eight months.

As per my last seven to eight months of experience, it is a stable solution.

It can be scaled.

I'm not technically involved with technical support. I'm not from the operational part where the day-to-day activities are performed. I'm from the project team, and my job is to deploy something on the product. Untill now, I haven't used VMware support for any issues. So, I'm not aware of the quality of their support.

It was easy to set up. It hardly took a week.

It provides all the networking features under a single umbrella. So, you can go with it. It is cost-effective because you don't have to spend money on different vendors.

I would rate it a seven out of ten because some of the features are missing.

We use VMware NSX for micro-segmentation.

The most valuable features of VMware NSX are the tight integration with the VMware Hypervisor natively and the management console. We have a lot of other integrations where you are able to see the virtual machine's end-to-end visibility.

VMware NSX can improve the migration tools from the older environments to the new environment. For example, the NSX-V has become a legacy solution, it's out of support, but customers are able to keep using it. For migration purposes, it's better for them to provide a proper tool. It will be easy to migrate from an old environment to a new one.

I have used VMware NSX within the last 12 months.

The stability of VMware NSX is very high.

VMware NSX can scale to any sized organization, small or large.

Our recent clients had approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

I have not had any problems with the support from VMware NSX.

I rate the support from VMware NSX a four out of five.

I have used other network virtualization tools and the main difference is VMware NSX is tightly integrated with the Hypervisor layer. We've been able to have end-to-end visibility of the virtual machine traffic, and we have been able to see the flow. The other solution will be agent-based.

The setup of VMware NSX is very easy.

I rate the setup of VMware NSX a four out of five.

The price of VMware NSX is very good compared to other solutions.

I rate the price of VMware NSX a five out of five.

I rate VMware NSX an eight out of ten.

Have used this solution to implement PAS (PCF) and have also used it for Native Datacenter networking as part of DC refresh.

Have worked on multiple organizations with VMware NSX. It heavily depends on the use case of the solution and how well you are able to use all the features of the product. When using for K8s container platforms or a networking backed for on premises cloud using a CMP(VRA, VIO) then VMware NSX is the best SDN solution but If an organization is not able to use NSX to its full potential (Switching, Routing, Load-balancing, Firewall, IDS, IPS etc.) then its not worth it.

Logical routing, switching are  overall good feature of this SDN solution especially when using CMP's and distributed firewall is very attractive features for micro-segmentation.

In rare situation there are  mismatch in the control plane data and dataplane data i.e. the details and what you actually see on the transport note. This is rare but time consuming to troubleshoot . Additionally, there could be better integration between VMware Cloud Federation (VCF) and NSX-T. Currently, there are some limitations, for example, VCF allows just one overlay transport zone. Also there is not upgrade path from VCF 3(NSX-T 2.5.x) to VCF 4 (NSX-T 3.x)

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The stability is good and is getter better after each new release.

The solution is scalable. In the 2.4 version, the controller got merged to create the cluster manager, it now is even better.

The technical support was pretty good, but recently I have had quite a few bad experiences with the support. But that really depends on the account and geographic location and multiple other factors

We have using Cisco ACI  and it is a strong competitor. When you are not using NSX NCP then everything that you need from SDN prospective can be done in Cisco ACI except for the distributed firewall at the vnic level.

The initial installation feels at first a little complex because there are a lot of components, but when you get the understanding after a short time, it is fine.

I was not involved in the purchase of the solution but I hear it is on the expensive side. That is why quite a few companies are moving towards open source because there are multiple solutions such as NginX, that can do the load balancing, and Calico and Flannel can do your logical switching routing.

If there is already VMware environment then it makes sense to use NSX-V, NSX-T as it can be integrated with other VMware automation products. But if approach it towards opensource then other SDN solutions like flannel, Nginx etc. can be evaluated depending on the use case.

If you are wanting to implement this solution I would advise if your project supports it then definitely. You should have a solid use case, the solution is rich in feature sets and you should use all of them. Then only is it worth the money, if you are just buying it for your logical switching and routing, then it is not worth it.

I rate VMware NSX a seven 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.