vRealize Network Insight Reviews

We actually write a plugin for vRA that allows customers to integrate with third-party vendors, such as IPAM solutions, DNS, SolarWinds, BlueCat, Infoblox, and about 30 other modules. We both use vRNI and build for it.

It has been performing really well.

We're a smaller company. It automates a lot of the tasks and lets us focus in on building out our own solution. It's quicker, there is less building of manual solutions, and less downtime.

It allows our developers to quickly develop, get provisioning done, de-provisioning, etc; the stuff that you would expect to be able to make it streamlined.

The most valuable feature is the Extensibility Framework.

It also lets us automate a lot of the mundane tasks that we would do manually, and keep them consistent and repeatable.

One of the first things that you'll see in 7.5 is that they improved on the user-interface: being able to filter on stuff, having a cleaner interface, and easy navigation.

In terms of room for improvement, customer education is number one. It has nothing to do with the product itself but it would help if there were an understanding of its limitations, or the fact that it is a framework, that it is extensible and that you're not getting everything out-of-the-box. What you are getting is the framework out-of-the-box. Knowing that, you're going to look to either build your own custom solutions or you're going to go to companies like ours and get a solution that is already supported and maintained, so you can focus on your company's main mission.

It's pretty solid. We haven't really had any issues with it. Being a VMware partner, we usually provide feedback to their product management team. But on the whole, it's pretty stable.

It can definitely scale, from a smaller company like ours, all the way up to a large company like VMware, Dell EMC. It works great either way.

I was not involved in the initial setup but we just did an upgrade and, while I wasn't directly involved, the overall experience was pretty good. It worked as expected and then we worked with support for any issues that we found during the upgrade process.

Reduction in roll-out time, decreased time to value, is our ROI.

For the most part, it is user-friendly. It continues to grow and mature. It's definitely headed in the right direction. The fact that they continue to want to improve the customer experience is important. The product is great to begin with but they realize that nothing is perfect and they want to keep improving it.

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.

Login site gives you the opportunity to collect logs from all of your hypervisors and your virtual servers, then put them all in one location and make them searchable.

It's faster access and searchability of the logs for troubleshooting.

Better integration into VRB.

We did our due diligence, studied best practices, read the documentation, prepared a plan, presented the plan, and everybody understood what's going to happen.

It is best to have a contingency plan to back out if things go wrong.

Stability is there. A 10 out of 10.

Scalability is about a 10 out of 10.

I have not used technical support for this solution.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward. It took about 10 minutes.

We used an in-house team.

Dell EMC, Hitachi, and sometimes Microsoft.

We chose VMware because they have one of the better products on the market for what they do: virtualization.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor is that they're there when you need them.

For someone looking at this solution: Look deep.

At IBM we enable vRealize Network Insight in our mission-critical architecture, so we'll be using vRealize Network Insight to monitor and get deep inside to our networking, including with NSX.

It's intuitive and user-friendly. It can be a bit painful to deploy. Product provides excellent overview across physical and virtual networks in your virtual environment . In large organizations where vSphere / SDDC / Private Cloud deployments have thousands of VMs and network segments that product definitely bring significant benefit in terms of monitoring, troubleshooting and granular details of network deployment and traffic of connected devices (physical or virtual ) and last but not least holistic view of your network domain. 

The gradual way the Network Insight shows you all the relevant information about your networks. It's pretty good. You can really dig deep deep inside and see where the problem is, where it comes from, what you have inside, how did you configure it. Also, it has alerts so you can have pretty much quite a big overview about your network. This is really something good.

I would give 7 to 8. There is always room for improvement.

For example:

Deployment process ,Appliance and Proxy VM, is getting configuration done in VM Console. This configuration can definitely be done on web interface (e.g. vROPS) for sake of simplicity and admin sanity.

LDAP / Active Directory integration configuration is not straight forwards as with other products on vRealize portfolio

Roles and User permissions configuration differs from other products, and in scenarios where certain group of individual need to have specific permissions across vRealize products  configuration is not out of the box.

Clustering across Geo locations (Dual Site scenarios or different L2 Domains) or any other mechanism that can provide HA or maintain data availability across sites.

Offering few sizes of deployment would benefit customers that don't have big foot print in on-prem or cloud, but still would like to get the product into their infrastructure, for whatever reason. Current size of the virtual appliance is not suitable for small and medium size environments. 

You can deploy proxy VMs, so it means that if you need to monitor different segments or different deployments of NSX you always can deploy a proxy VM and then monitor those networks within your vRealize Network Insight.

I have never actually had a chance to talk with the technical support about the product, but I assume they are brilliant.

We did not. Since the NSX footprint growth in data centers the majority of the cloud providers who are the companies start looking for something to have more gradual detail on the infrastructure in how the network goes and what the network traffic is, so it's better for troubleshooting, better for holistic overview of your network infrastructure. Before that, we didn't use anything. That's why the troubleshooting was a bit difficult.

It is straightforward. You need to have an IP address. You don't need to do any additional configuration of the appliances, but once you deploy the appliances then you need to do the configuration on the cause-all, which I think it's a bit more not that straightforward and not that intuitive. It could be better to have the initial configuration of the pliers to be over a web interface or some other wizard.

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 it to monitor and log the traffic for our virtual servers. We are migrating our virtual servers into a new software-defined data center from a legacy infrastructure. When I migrate the reports into the new infrastructure, I use vRealize Network Insight to monitor or log the traffic from the servers and implement those reports into the NSX firewall. Therefore, our servers will be ready for our migration into our new data center.

We now have a lot less administration after implementing the new service or removing an old system from our new software-defined data center. It has removed investigation time into ports and server traffic on virtual machines. Thus, it saves time.

Network and management is so much better within this solution and the whole software-defined network when we use NSX. I also manage the NSX firewall which flags the security in NSX. A lot of time is saved when you use this type of software solution for the network. We have moved systems into the new data center and the servers and systems are much faster because of the very low latency between virtual machines.

I can see the network traffic which is being used by the servers that we are going to move into our new data center. This avoids an investigation and asking administrators of the system which ports they need open, since I am able to see it beforehand (before I move the servers) and implement all firewall routes.

I use the flowchart to see the network flows which are going in and out of the servers. I export this information into an Excel worksheet and remove common traffic ports, which we are implementing for every virtual machine.

The solution is very intuitive. I know junior consultants who easily use it and don't have much experience. 

I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this. Right now, I am not getting the result I want. So, I want to see the timeline two weeks back from now, including all the flows. I haven't figured out how to do this. If this is not possible now, maybe in the next release, as this would be a very nice function for me.

It has never been unstable nor gone down.

It suits us perfectly and scales with our departments.

I have no personal experience working with technical support.

We used a reseller and our experience with them was good. They implemented our entire software-define data center.

We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective.

It's a great solution.

You do need knowledge and understanding of network traffic, protocols, and ports to understand when you do a search, since you receive flowcharts about the ports in use. This is more technical knowledge of how your network works. However, the tool is very much intuitive.

Our primary use case for the product is for preparing for NSX deployments, looking at flows between VMs, and to help us troubleshoot also.

It has helped us tremendously to be able to easily deploy NSX in our environment with microsegmentation. It has also helped us with time to value. It has helped with network visibility for sure.

NetFlow to help us understand how VMs communicate with each other over ports that are known and ports that are also unknown to us. Our company is a security company, so it's very important for us to know exactly which VMs are doing what at all times.

It's very intuitive and friendly to use. It's a very Google-like search, you just type in a VM name and it pops up with that information and you can look at all the flows right from the single pane of glass.

It's kind of hard (to come up with room for improvement) on an almost-perfect product. Room for improvement: Maybe a little more help in regards to when you're searching for something, give me little "help bubbles" about what those terms will help search for.

The product itself is very stable.

It is very scalable.

We have used tech support for vRNI for doing upgrades and for deployment considerations, and the experience was fantastic.

I was involved in the original deployment. Very straightforward, very easy to deploy.

The upgrade experience for vRNI is probably one of the easiest out there. You enable a support tunnel, you let them know, and they do it all remotely, and it just works

The ROI for vRNI is, in my opinion, that it especially helps with deploying NSX, that you're not having to manually chase down and figure out what you need to do to microsegment VMs. This gives a nice option where you can say, "Hey, this VM, show me what flows are there." I can export it out and then import it as an NSX rule and job done.

There was nobody else on our shortlist when we chose vRNI.

The rating for the product would be a nine because I don't know of anything that would be a ten. Nothing's perfect.

We mostly use it for profiling applications. It works quite well.

It has made the migration to NSX much easier. Most of the sys admins within the smaller silos, they have no idea what ports are needed to run their stuff at all. I am pretty sure the micro-segmentation would never, ever have occurred without it.

• The profiling of the applications for micro-segmentation.
• The alerting is quite nice.

It's user-friendly. It's not super intuitive. It's a rather complicated program. It's networking, and networking is relatively complicated. But it does a really good job of displaying the relationships between things.

They can always build upon it and add more stuff, but as it stands right now, it's perfectly fine.

I would like to see application identification. That would be cool.

I've never had any issues with it. It's up and running all the time.

I've not had to try scaling it at all. The standard sizing, so far, has been more than sufficient.

Technical support has been responsive. The response has always been immediate. Whether or not they've fixed it immediately is a different story. Most of the things I've come to them with have needed some investigation and took a week or so.

The initial setup was trivial.

I have had the opportunity to upgrade it to a newer version several times. It has actually improved over time. It's much easier now. You can now just upgrade with the GUI. A single click of a button and off it goes. Before, you had to download all the packages and then manually SFTP them to the server and manually hit the install.

This was really the only solution that provided the features that we were looking for.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is whether or not we think they're going to survive for more than the next license cycle.

I would rate this solution a strong nine out of 10. It would be a 10 if it were free.