vRealize Network Insight Reviews

The primary scope of vRealize Network Insight is deployment of NSX to visualize north-south and east-west traffic. We mainly use it to implement data on the NSX.

It shows the customer what's going on their network. The product makes it much easier to show the customer the needs of their network virtualization. This is interesting because a network admin thinks they know what's going on in their network, but they don't.

We format the network flows with the customer for certain times. After that, we can see what their needs, sizing, etc.

It is the first time that you see what your network traffic is doing, where it's going, and where it's coming from. A customer is usually surprised to see how much data is being transferred from the Internet or to the Internet, but also from the east-west traffic as well. It's very interesting because VMware mainly configures their switches on a CLI-base. 

If you have something you want to investigate further, you can just click on it. Then, you can investigate down to the point where you or the customer says, "That's enough information. I don't want to go any further." That's the intuitive part. We don't have to use any algorithms. It's all configured beforehand, which makes it easy and fun to use.

The solution helps reduce time to value, increase performance, provide deep visibility, and easily manage networks.

The virtual appliance has rebooted, but overall, the stability is good.

The initial was straightforward. You can have it up and running in one hour.

It has brought more money into our company.

We show the solution to customers who need to implement NSX or will be moving into the virtualization, because even nowadays, there are still companies which are not virtualized. The graphical interface makes it easier for customers to see the benefits of it.

We also have Cisco customers who use Cisco switches. Cisco has a CLI tool where you can check throughput, performance, etc. 

Use the product. It's pretty cool.

We are able to analyze application flows through the network.

It is performing very well. It allows us to do a quick analysis of protocols, applications, and network pathing for our customers, then it has them analyze their needs for working application availability.

It's very hard to find anything that works this well.

There are two different benefits that we derive out of the tool:

1. The assessment-based approach: When we go in to do services work or we are trying to understand sizing, what we need to deploy from an NSX perspective is an assessment tool. This helps us be very narrow and specific-focused. It allows us to assess and give quotes back very quickly. 
2. We use it in our services practice. Before we go and do any type of NSX services engagement, we use this tool on the customer's site to look at the environment and figure out some of our scoping and how we will scope our services. It allows us to be more efficient and pinpoint around the use case and actual solution.

The number one most valuable feature is the visualization of the network flows; being able to see them in a very rich, visual way is the most impactful part of it. We use it to monitor network flows in a couple different ways. We use it as an assessment tool to go into customers and look at network flows, then figure out where the applications are talking to each other, how they're talking to each other, what protocols they're speaking on, and what other servers they're connected to from the network. This is very valuable for helping us either plan application migrations or be able to figure out things like distributing firewall rules, etc., so we can easily be able to identify and distribute the firewall within the product, which is primarily what its designed to assist with.

The second most important thing is the segregation of all the different protocols which are in the ports. We are able to identify and analyze each one of these protocols. This is extremely useful when we are talking about applications moving from on-premise to cloud.

It is very user-friendly and intuitive, especially given some of the natural language queries that it allows for. This is one of the benefits of the tool and the dashboarding which comes with the visualization of it. The ability to use the natural language query and see the visualization is quickly intuitive, and it works very well.

I would like to see more interoperability on the firewall and low balancer sides.

I like that you can integrate in Palo Alto networks. There is Cisco switching in there as well. We can see the actual path tracing through these products. I would like to add in there any other integrations from a services perspective, such as Big-IP F5 and some other APIs. Palo Alto has a little bit of an advantage, which is fine, but it would be great to see a little bit more integration, especially on the GUI side when we are tracking about some of that pack and flow. It would be great to be able to see other vendors be integrated into the product as well.

We have never experienced any downtime with this product.

We typically have been using it in medium-sized businesses, so we haven't scaled it out to thousands. We have small customers and a couple customers who we do larger amounts in the thousands. However, for us, it's in the hundreds VMs and/or hosts, and we have had no issues at that level. We have been able to scale horizontally and vertically.

It's controller-based and VM-based. It takes a couple different VMs to run it, and it seems to be covering all the scale that we need.

We use our channel resources. Therefore, we have Channel Sales Engineers and Core SEs, then we also have NSX Channel SEs. If we run into problems, and things are not working right or we are getting a display that we're not familiar with, we typically use our resources. Thus, we don't typically call into the general VMware support.

We have an assessments team that we use for the assessments. If we are doing a no-fee assessment when we are installing, we have a team who will do this and help the customer run it for 30 days for a trial run. 

We typically set it up ourselves from an assessment perspective, then when we do services delivery, we typically will do that as part of our service. We will bake that in to whenever we do an NSX engagement, and we will always do at least a vRNI assessment. Then, this helps us be able to sell that product to them as well. When they see the visualization and the ease in which you can monitor the environment, we typically we try to sell vRNI in addition to NSX.

It depends on the technical level of the customers who we are working with. Some customers are very comfortable dropping in OVAs and VMs. It's fairly straightforward for us to do that. We typically include this as part of our vRNI service.

The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries.

We are a managed service provider so we spend a lot of time helping customers transition into the cloud. Application and rationalization are critical, so having this tool allows us to have another tool in our toolkit. This tool is critical because from a VMware perspective, it's really the only tool that does application rationalization. It gives us rich feedback that we need. We help customers move workloads to the right cloud. It's invaluable for us because it gives us that rich data to help us be successful. 

It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly.

It seems like it is fairly competitively priced. We are able to do fairly well with selling it. It seems well-priced, and we're able to do very well with the product.

We use a couple different tools, like RightScale, for application rationalization. Obviously, it's very challenging to get data out of a virtualized environment. vRNI does it better than anything we've used in the past. This is the biggest differentiator over other tools that we have been using. Now, we use vRNI along with other application analysis tools that we use in other practices within our company. We have been able to essentially add a lot of value using this tool with other practices and offerings that we do around application rationalization.

We typically just deploy the latest version that we have, and that's it. We don't go back and do upgrades. Either the customers are doing that themselves or we don't have a specific service that does that. 

This is a must have product if you're a very big gamma customer. You have to have a way to analyze how networking is slowing through your environment.

We used to have the 1000V when we had Cisco for our Cisco customers, and we could use some of that solution, but there is not really any other tool that will provide the type of fidelity and richness of beta that you will need from your VMware environment regardless of whether you're deploying NSX or not, giving you that rich visualization of what's happening in the network layer and what's happening with the application layer within that networking layer in VMware. This is the only tool that you can obtain this level of richness from it.

They have a legacy environment that they're trying to use microsegnmentation on. So the use case is to facilitate that because they don't necessarily know a lot of the firewall rules from the original environment, which was a physical environment. Now that it has gone virtual, they want to use the vRNI to get better firewall rules in there and make it more streamlined.

The main usage of it is microsegmentation and troubleshooting, not real monitoring of the environment, because we have other tools that do the monitoring of the environment. But when it comes down to bringing in new environments and making sure they're microsegmented, it's pretty easy to use for that purpose. No other product is available to do that.

And we use it for troubleshooting because it allows us to go from virtual through NSX, up to the core, and see all of that in one pane of glass. It's pretty easy.

Right now, since the PoC, in the environment that we're using it on, for troubleshooting any issues that come up, or in the case of the microsegmentation, it's very valuable because it has allowed us to add firewall rules that were specific to what we needed, and not the extra firewall rules that other people thought we needed.

It has allowed us to easily take the physical environment and bring it into virtual and then put together the firewall rules that were needed, not necessarily firewall rules that everybody thought we needed, which were already in the old firewalls. We were able to do that much quicker doing it this way, rather than trying to weed out all the rules that didn't necessarily need to be there.

Troubleshooting-wise, we did have a problem in the environment and it made it easier to find the actual issue, the real issue, not something that we thought was the issue.

The microsegmentation is valuable, especially for this environment.

Also, the ability to troubleshoot all the way across the NSX part of it to the physical and actually watch the packets go through and then see where the bottleneck is or where the interruption is, is valuable. We run queries on the network flows within the application to find where they are in it and it graphically tells us how the packets are actually going through the system.

It's very user-friendly in the sense that the querying is just regular language like you and I speak or write. You don't need to know any SQL-query type of language to be able to get what you want out of it.

The only real improvement they can make is to add more third-party vendors into the environment, mostly switch manufacturers, because it's really limited to Cisco equipment and there are a lot of companies out there other than Cisco.

It seems to be very stable. I don't know how it's going to be when we go into production. Right now, we have a single instance of it, but in production, it has to be a cluster environment and we haven't really tested that part of it.

When it goes into production, it's going to have to scale from this one, small installation to a much larger installation for our purpose. It seems like it will do it pretty easily, but we won't know until we actually do it.

It was pretty easy to install and the documentation for laying it out seems to be easy to follow, design-wise. It was very straightforward.

We've upgraded four times with it and the upgrading was pretty easy as well.

It could be cheaper, of course.

We're not really comparing it to any other vendors. I don't know of anyone that does microsegmentation and whose solution is integrated within VMware's environment

It's a pretty good system if you're doing troubleshooting and microsegmentation. As a troubleshooting tool, it's a level-3 troubleshooting-skills tool and it's very easy to use and very easy to find the information that you need.

I rate it a seven out of ten, only because it doesn't have all the vendors - at least the switch vendors - in there. They only have Cisco, for the most part, and you really need all of them to make it because companies don't just use Cisco for everything.

The primary use is to identify different types of traffic that are in the network and identify what policies we need to apply to meet our security requirements.

The performance has been excellent.

It has definitely helped us to meet compliance rules by assuring that all traffic is going to where it's supposed to go. It can be used to report that you are in compliance, as well as helping you get into compliance. We use it on an ongoing basis to show our clients in our cloud that traffic is not going to them that isn't supposed to be. We have customers that have to be assured that our environment is safe for them, and it gives them that confidence, that knowledge. We retain customers longer.

It has reduced time to value for sure because it would be very hard to do this any other way. We would have to sniff packets, and that's just very labor intensive.

It allows you to see traffic that you couldn't otherwise see, which is traffic within your Layer 3-bounded network, meaning east-west traffic. It's hard to get that any other way.

To monitor the network flows, all you have to do is install it. It has an OVA that you deploy to vCenter, and then it will sit there, and it will listen on the network, and it will catch traffic within the virtual environment.

It is user-friendly. It's pretty simple to deploy and to run. It gives you pretty easy-to-understand reports, very graphically intense, so you can visualize what's going on in your network.

Reporting could be a little bit smoother. I would like it to be more intuitive to create a report that would automatically send stuff out on a periodic basis; for a management-oversight reports and the like. You can probably do that right now, I just haven't figured it out in the interface yet.

It's very stable. The way that it deploys and the way that it performs, it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

I don't know that I can speak to the issue of scalability, to a giant enterprise level, but we have quite a few servers in our farm, and virtual machines, and it has scaled well to that.

My experience with technical support has been very good. The amount of time it takes for them to get back to you truly depends on each incident. For me, it wasn't an emergency situation, so it took a couple of days. But if we do have a situation where something is down, then they get back to us immediately.

In term of customer service, we are a VMware partner, so we get different customer service than other people do, but ours is very good.

There wasn't really anything similar to this before. We knew that there were things going on, but we really couldn't tell. We didn't know how to get at it and, when we found this solution, it was a no-brainer that we were going to try it. They give you a trial version on it so you can see if it's going to be of value to you before you purchase it. It showed its value right away. This solution came to us. We weren't actively searching for it at that particular time.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, for us, are that 

• we know the vendor has been around
• we have confidence in them
• they have a good support system.

We are always going to have issues with products, so if they can help us overcome those issues, then we're much happier with the product.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's set-it-and-forget-it.

Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it.

For this product, we wanted to introduce NSX into our environment. Previously, we were using all Cisco, so we wanted to try Network Insight to find the vulnerabilities in our environment and whether our environment was compatible with NSX. That was the premier objective in using this product.

It improves efficiency. Sometimes, to implement a project we have a bottleneck which takes a lot of time in dealing with the network team. But now, with NSX deployed and Net Insight there, we can troubleshoot any issues proactively. It helps us get things deployed very quickly.

It has reduced time to value.

We see about a 20 - 25 percent increase in performance, because of this solution.

In terms of more easily managing networks and improving the visibility, that's the best side of this product, and we're enjoying it. It helps us to manage the network easily.

It gives us the workflow. If we deploy NSX it shows us how the workflow will flow in the organization, what the roadblocks are, and what we need to do to overcome those hurdles. When we run this product, it gives us reports which describe problems with physical switches. We work with the network team to get them all resolved.

It's very intuitive. The GUI is very effective. It's a very good product, it's very easy to explore.

Log Insight from VMware is similar to what Network Insight does. If it had some kind of plugins with vSphere, more effective plugins with Horizon View or other VMWare products, if it had interconnectivity, I think it would be more effective than it is today.

It's stable.

We can add more appliances. It's easily scalable.

Initially, we had to use a lot of technical support because nobody had much expertise. But eventually, we developed expertise. We had to call support to get things done. Now, if there are any complex issues, we get into support calls.

We have upgraded it, we applied one patch. It was easy because it's appliance-based, so we just got the pack and uploaded it.

We have ROI data, but it's confidential so I cannot disclose it. But overall, we have had a very good experience. We have had a good return on investment on this. It's a very good product.

Cost-wise it's reasonable, maybe because we have all VMware products under one umbrella, so they have given us a good discount. But overall, it's very efficient and rich in features.

We considered Cisco and we considered some other small vendors, as well as Palo Alto. But eventually, because we are a VMware shop and our entire team was working with VMware, we went with this product.

I rate it a nine out of ten. I'm a little bit skeptical, I never give a ten. But otherwise, in the next release, if they made it more intuitive - it's definitely intuitive - but if there were some more features and it let us know about east-west traffic as well, that would be more helpful.

We are using vRealize Network Insight to map all the connections between the servers.

The vRealize Networking site meets our expectations, especially since it allows you to add servers manually. For example, if you have a CSV file, you can upload it manually on the network side and establish relationships between physical servers and virtual servers.

The automation collects all the relationships between servers, allowing us to visualize these relationships and organize the migration into waves. We're using it to create waves—wave one, wave two, wave three—so we can migrate groups of servers simultaneously from one domain to another.

Since Broadcom acquired VMware, it has been experiencing challenges. Many sales processes are not well defined.

They can show a little bit more information because vRealize Network Insight is virtual and is looking or searching for a virtual environment. They can show a little bit more details about the relationship.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.

The initial setup is easy.

I rate the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

ROI is really about reducing the time it takes to map your network. For example, you can have just one person discover your entire network with a few clicks and start monitoring communication between servers. The ROI comes from using fewer people and less time to map your network.

The sales team often complains about the cost whenever we need to quote vRealize Network.

One key advantage of using it is that if your infrastructure includes VMware servers, it’s very easy and straightforward to deploy and start collecting data, especially if your environment is fully virtualized. However, suppose your environment is a mix of virtual and physical servers. In that case, getting detailed information about your physical servers within the vRealize Networking site can be challenging.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We're using it for our microsegmentation project. The performance has been good.

To some degree, it has increased performance, helped to more easily manage networks, and provided visibility. It pulls up more of the physical part of the network.

I like being able to see the flows coming in and out of the product.

In terms of monitoring network flows, we use it to verify whether or not different servers/applications should be communicating with each other.

It needs to be a little easier to use and to understand the information it's putting out. That would make it more helpful.

If you're not a network person you need to understand things like network policies and concepts. If you gave it to a regular admin, it would be nice if it were easier for them to pick up what is going on, understand the flows and whether or not stuff should be talking to each other, as opposed to just port groups and IP addresses.

Also, if it were more application-aware, more descriptive; if it were able to determine the application that is actually doing the communication, that would be easier. More application information: which user or account it's accessing, is it accessing this application, doing these calls, if it is accessing a script, which script is it accessing. Things like that would provide deeper analytics so I can track what's going on. It would not just be, "These people shouldn't be talking," but who is actually doing these calls.

And it would be good if it could correlate the server and not just a SQL call, but which database, which server, that would be helpful. I would like to see more things along those lines.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

We don't have any issues with the scalability. The scalability has been fine.

We haven't had to use tech support at all.

We were buying VMware NSX Enterprise as a security solution, to better lock down our environment. vRealize Network Insight was one of the tools they suggested we get, as part of that package, to make the implementation easier.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• ease of use
• integration
• interoperability
• support
• vendor reputation.

I have been using VMware since v1.5. I know the reputation and the support and that helped a lot. Also, their being the leader in the industry, the direction they have been going, and their forward-thinking, were all part of our decision to go with them. A lot of the other vendors are playing catch-up or they're plugging into the VMware infrastructure, so why would I go to somebody else when I can go with somebody who owns the code?

I set it up. It was pretty straightforward to set up. It was pretty easy, especially compared to some other VMware products.

I have also had the opportunity to upgrade it to a newer version. It was easy. It wasn't bad at all.

We bought a package deal so I can't specify the ROI on just this part of it.

Make sure the solution you're looking at is compatible with what you want to do and that it has future growth to it; not just a pinpoint solution but a solution that is part of a bigger vision. You don't want to buy a product that does just this one thing and then you have to buy another product to do something else. Make sure it has interoperability and integration points with some of your bigger infrastructure.

I would rate vRNI at eight out of 10. It would be a 10 if it could bubble up deeper application and user information.

I use the solution for virtualization and monitoring purposes.

The reports, insights, and add-ons where it's monitoring at a specific time on daily reports. For example, it shows when we can use customized reports at any time for any request raised.

It just needs to be more reliable and more accurate. At some point, there are some things where it does not match properly. I guess they have released the newer version of the solution, but I have not tried it yet.

I guess it's an old solution I am using. However, It seems fine for the time being. But if you allow me some time to test an issue from the newest version, I guess it could be good for me.

I have been using vRealize Network Insight for four years. I am a customer of vRealize Network Insight.

I believe that a couple of years ago, I contacted technical support due to some issues with vRealize Network Insight, and it was resolved immediately. Technical support was helpful.

The initial setup was straightforward.

All VMware products are expensive. So, vRealize Network Insight is expensive.

We need other metrics that could be useful for monitoring purposes. So, we need a solution with parameters and metrics. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.