Share your experience using vRealize Network Insight

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

The IT infrastructure industry is expected to evolve towards a hybrid cloud model in the next five to ten years. In this model, most of the customer's resources reside on-premise within a private cloud setup, such as VMware. Another segment operates within public cloud environments like Azure and AWS, and a portion remains in traditional data centers.

There should be seamless interoperability between public and private clouds. AWS and VMware need to work together to make it possible. Whether users interact with on-premise infrastructure or configure resources in the public cloud, the user experience must be seamless. 

I have been working with the product for a decade. 

I rate the product's stability a ten out of ten. 

I rate vRealize Network Insight's scalability a ten out of ten. 

I rate vRealize Network Insight's deployment a nine out of ten. Small configurations can be completed in a couple of hours. But more complex configurations can take several days, especially if you need to get the design approved first. The criticality of the environment also plays a role in determining how much time is needed.

My customers have seen ROI with the tool's use. It is the reason VMware is the market leader in the domain. 

I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten. 

The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment.

Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers.

Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

We have deployed vRealize Network Insight in two or three environments for our customers' NSX implementations. It helps us in creating the network architecture and planning before deploying NSX. We use Network Insight to gather data and determine firewall rules and communication between virtual machines.

So far, vRealize Network Insight is helping us to decide on architecture and NSX networks for our customers.

One of the valuable features of Network Insight is its ability to provide detailed information about east-west traffic within the data center. With this product, we can precisely identify communication patterns between virtual machines within our data center, whether it's east-east or east-west communication.

There is room for improvement when it comes to pricing because we pay here in Brazil, and all the costs are based on the dollar. Our currency is a bit weak at the moment. It becomes a little expensive to buy this kind of product.

vRealize Network Insight has good technical support. It's really good support.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy. It's an easy setup, like plug-and-play. It's just a matter of deploying the virtual appliances and making a few configurations to start collecting data. The hardest part is analyzing the data, but the network consultants help us with reports to determine the filters we need to apply on the NSX firewalls.

Only one person is required for maintenance. We have just one analyst who knows how to handle vRealize Network Insight, and it's okay. We don't need additional personnel because our customers have small environments. So, we don't require a whole team of two or three, or four people to work with vRealize Network Insight.

I saw some ROI. Our customer teams have been able to spend less time on operational duties, vRealize Network Insight allows them to accomplish more with the same number of people on their teams. I do know that they are saving time.

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten. vRealize can improve and lower the price a little. Here, in Brazil, we have a distributor between the reseller and the manufacturer, and this distributor has a significant impact on the final cost of the product. But I do believe that they can lower it a bit. It's always a good choice to lower something, especially prices. 

Overall, I would give vRealize Network Insight a nine out of ten.