vRealize Network Insight Reviews

We have Tanzu, and we also work with multiple Kubernetes services such as Nutanix and Google. We are working on these Kubernetes services on the operations side. For Tanzu, we have several components, and one of those is what we call our container management.

We use vNRI and vROps, which is known as vRealize Operations Manager.

We are using vRealize Network Insight for the platform which we are managing.

For cloud monitoring, we have observability and cost management solutions such as vNRI and vROps, among other things.

We get proper reporting on different aspects such as utilization and health monitoring reports. We can achieve all of this from there, including throughput details and network latency. There are many things we can obtain from there.

The solution has stability, but keeping tight monitoring and routine checks is needed because proper management is essential; otherwise, it will collapse easily.

There is room for improvement as not all cases are getting resolved, and we often do not get L3 support directly, having to go through L1 and L2, resulting in delays that usually are a headache for us. Even being a VCF customer, we sometimes don't receive proper support. Scaling it to seven is reasonable. I will not be too conservative.

I have been working with this vRealize Network Insight solution for around five years, more than five years.

The deployment of vRealize Network Insight is quite straightforward with the documentation available. It is very straightforward, and we have to connect those vCenters. It is not that much rocket science. It is easier.

It's directly from VMware; we implemented it and are using it internally as a user.

Micro-segmentation is part of NSX, which is again a network component. We are managing that one but usually we have an API connector between our firewall vendor and our VMware NSX.

vRealize Network Insight doesn't need to be scaled because it's actually a management console used to monitor networking and operations. Once installed on any management servers, you can add N number of nodes there to monitor, and if you have different vCenters across different data centers, you can add everything after opening up the necessary ports inside. Scalability will not be a matter for this one as it is a management server.

We are paying too much for technical support from VMware, so they have to provide that.

I would give the quality of support a rating of six out of ten.

VMware's solution could be better in some ways. VMware completely changed their licensing protocol, and now I am moving towards Nutanix, which has everything in-built: micro-segmentation, reporting, and application mapping, whatever possibilities are inside NSX, it's available in Nutanix. It's not an enterprise class, but it is almost equal to a similar set of workloads.

In VMware you have to buy a separate license for it. We have VVF and VCF-type of licenses, and if you want to go with this NSX and sort of higher-end professional services, you need to go with VCF. Cloud Foundation is pretty costly.

I see some differences between VMware and Nutanix from a technical standpoint. Their operating system differs, for instance, we are using vSphere while they are using Prism, which is a completely different solution based on Ansible that can manage a lot of things and is basically more reliable. Additionally, with three nodes, the storage is spread across them, making it quite comprehensive.

We cannot completely compare with VMware because VMware has its own benefits, but the pricing is crucial for any department. Nowadays, Nutanix is offering better discounts, buybacks, and helping the customer in various ways to protect their investment.

It is expensive. Once VMware moved to Broadcom, we have seen a lot of uncertainty on the licensing part, moving from perpetual to core-based licensing, and there is some buzz already happening in the market. We just don't know what tomorrow's price will be, with many agreements already closed, such as with Dell, where they have started fighting over some unsupported servers, leading to many rumors affecting VMware's credibility right now.

We have Tanzu and OpenShift. We have OpenShift, Canonical, and the Tanzu one. The Tanzu platform from VMware is a Kubernetes platform.

We haven't completely installed Tanzu yet; we installed the vROps part.

vRealize Network Insight is beneficial because you can control the East-West traffic. vRealize has a component called NSX, which has East-West traffic controlling and micro-segmentation, that is one of the best options, and we have the layer extension, layer 2 extension possible through NSX.

If you have anything accountable in any business, even in a candy business, having proper accountability on what you are selling and buying will save a lot. If you don't know what you're selling and buying, you will end up with a loss.

My team does not use the flow analytics feature; we have a security and network monitoring team, which is a different SOC team. I am using it as an administrator internally. We perform different tasks including costing analysis, capacity management, and many other things.

vRealize Network Insight has a concern about the maintenance part, as it requires a person to monitor it completely. It's not something you install and your report will be generated automatically. You have to work on this properly to get the insights.

vRealize Network Automation, vRealize Operations, and vRealize Network Insight are completely related to the network. I cannot say much about these network aspects because I am on the operations side, but overall, the vRealize suite is good for reporting perspective or any ISO-related documentation; this is very helpful.

The product is called vRealize Operations Manager, and now it is referred to as Aria or vAria. I am now a Senior System Specialist. We use different metrics because we have multiple departments, and we can monitor utilization and comparisons with the previous year.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a seven.

With vRealize Network Insight, I handle virtual virtualization products, particularly with VMware, focusing on Hypervisor and VSAN. I deal mostly with governments, agencies, and medium to large enterprises.

I find that the interface of most VMware products is very similar, which I consider an advantage due to its ease of use compared to other tools like Splunk. The integration with Veeam is also significant. One of the biggest problems with VMware NSX is logging, and vRealize Network Insight helps by providing comprehensive logs.

Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was working before, offering the suite of tools that clients actually use, and allowing clients to decide the best options for them. The philosophy of Broadcom is not clear to me, and I still do not understand it.

I have used VMware products for over fifteen years, Proxmox for three years, and other virtualization tools for many years.

After Broadcom acquired VMware, I would rate their support at five or less in many cases. It's difficult to find necessary documentation, open tickets, and get support. Contacts are gone, and issues take longer to resolve.

Neutral

I found Symantec backup to be a great solution until Veeam entered the game and Broadcom acquired Symantec. In my opinion, VMware is losing clients to numerous alternatives like Proxmox, XCP-ng, and Hyper-V.

I would rate the initial setup seven out of ten. The consistency of VMware tools having similar interfaces aids adaptation. However, configuring the solution can be complicated, especially as different versions may not be compatible.

Typically, one person can handle the setup, but involving a networking team may be necessary when adding elements like NSX.

Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.

I have noticed clients approaching for information about other solutions, with a significant increase in interest in Proxmox.

NA. I rate the overall solution an 8 out of 10.

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. 

vRealize is used to help our development team by producing detailed reports of the network flow and layout. This includes details like the TCP network keys and the RTT.

It has helped improve our organization by directing the network traffic using SDN.

The most valuable feature is the application pipeline.

The solution can be improved by making it more compatible with other brands, allowing for better integration.

I have been using the solution for almost one year.

We have had problems with the collectors in the older versions 6.2 and 6.3 that required rebooting the platform. The newest version 6.7 appears to be stable with no issues.

The solution is scalable with the addition of more licenses.

The technical support team is very good.

Previously we used Zabbix but it is not capable of analyzing the network flow inside the SDN.

The initial setup is straightforward as long as you follow the detailed step-by-step instructions supplied with the solution.

The implementation was done with the help of an engineer.

We have seen a return on investment with this solution.

Before choosing the solution we evaluated Calico.

I rate the solution ten out of ten.

For our requirements, five people are needed to maintain the solution. I recommend the solution tool for all networks and security.

I'm a consultant. I'm consulting and setting it up for my clients. I don't have one running in my environment.

Its use cases include:

• Deeper analytical insights into network traffic.
• Ability to troubleshoot network performance issues within the environment.
• NSXT, micro-segmentation recommendations after a thirty to sixty-day learning period to remove redundant firewall rules, make more efficient firewall rules, and then bring down the individual limits, i.e, the limits on how many firewall rules you can have on a vNIC. 

I also like them to use it for dependency mappings as part of migration projects and figure out everything is talking to what and ensure that we have them all in a consistency group replicating consistently. When we fail them over, bring them up in the proper order they need to be brought up in. Those are just a few of these cases.

All of its use cases helped a lot. If we're increasing network performance, we're cutting the risk down on our SLAs. We're increasing performance in the network. 

By doing dependency mapping, it makes migrations more efficient. There are less outages that require engineers to spend additional hours troubleshooting the migration failures. In addition, any way that we can use to maximize our distributed firewall rule policies, policies left, and CPU calculations on the servers increase the overall efficiency and performance of the cluster itself.

It depends on the use case. If I'm doing a migration, then dependency mapping is more critical to me than anything else. If I'm trying to ensure efficiency inside my micro-segmentation solution, that's a massive help there.

There's always room for improvement with anything, but as it exists today with its offerings, it's pretty rock solid in my opinion. It's such a great tool by itself for what I utilize it for. There could be some deeper analytics into packet inspection and trace flows. It could use some kind of machine learning to look at Layer 7 traffic for potential malware or corrupt packets.

There could be the ability to have more plug-ins and do more at the VMware offering so that it has got even tighter integration.

I've been using it for the past five years. 

It's pretty stable by itself. Something else has got to be wrong to mess that product up there.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of scalability.

It's deployed on the cloud as well as on-premises. Its setup depends on what you want. If you're just deploying the vRNI appliance and getting it online, getting it set up, and then just doing a basic plug-in to, for example, NSX-T, that's really simple and easy. When it comes to building out applications and doing some of the more advanced features set, you need a little schooling in that. The more complex you try to use a tool, the more complexity there will be, which means there will be a learning curve, and that's expected.

I believe if you use any tool correctly, you can get a return on investment.

It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some.

Try to find at least two use cases for the product and continue validating it after the installation.

I'd rate it a solid nine out of ten.

We use the solution for NSX-T Manager and the customer wanted to have the firewall rules in order to achieve micro-segmentation. To analyze their environment, we use vRealize Network Insight which provides us with all the firewall rules for traffic to and from. This is why we use vRealize Network Insight.

The best feature of this application is its ability to capture everything within the same application, as well as capture all the traffic. Essentially, the solution is capable of capturing anything that happens outside of the network port.

I thought that when we deployed vRealize Network Insight in our environment, we had to wait for four weeks or so for the solution to capture all the traffic in and out from each connected component. Then, we had to extract the data into an Excel format and analyze it. After that, we had to manually enter the data into NSX-T Manager. If there was an integration between vRNI and NSX-T Manager, we could extract all the firewall rules directly from NSX-T Manager. This would reduce the workload in half since we would not have to manually enter the same data into both systems. In my experience, the main purpose of vRNI was to obtain firewall rules for NSX-T Manager. If this was integrated, it would have been much easier, since the documentation work was too much. vRNI captures every traffic in and out, so the file can become huge if we have many components and machines in our environment. Integration would help identify the legitimate ports on vRNI and extract the final rules to push them directly to NSX-T Manager, which would make the task much easier.

The only issue we have is that the solution does not always capture the host names. We asked VMware for an explanation and they provided us with some reasons. Ideally, the DNS name should be captured, however, when we extracted the data onto an Excel sheet, we found that around 20 to 30 entries only had IP addresses. Therefore, we had to manually track those IP addresses and then input their hostname and username to identify what the IP address represented. It seems that something may not have captured this part, but there was a reason for it, and that has room for improvement.

I have used the solution for six months.

I used the solution for a few months and never encountered any issues; there were no glitches, nothing at all. Therefore, I can say the solution was completely functional.

I believe the solution is scalable, but for our environment, it was sufficient. In a much larger environment, they may need to deploy additional nodes. I am uncertain about the scalability, but I think it should be possible to add more nodes to the environment. For our environment, however, what we had was more than enough, so we never considered deploying additional nodes.

There were two or three of us working on the solution. I was primarily responsible for the main task, but it was important to have a backup in the company.

VMware itself was deploying this solution. They provided us with support in the backend for the deployment, and it was really good. Furthermore, VMware support is always helpful and competent in their work for other solutions as well.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. Deploying the appliance and running the wizard to complete the configuration is simple and not challenging.

We completed the deployment in two days, and after two days everything was in place. We then left the solution running for four weeks, as per our company policy for the client. Four weeks is a good amount of time to capture all the traffic in the environment. The deployment should have been shorter, but we encountered issues unrelated to vRNI, such as authentication, which prolonged the process. I believe the deployment should have taken only a few hours.

The implementation was completed in-house with the support of VMware on the backend.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

I definitely recommend the solution, as it was my first time using it and I really felt it captured all the necessary elements of the environment. The main benefit is that vRealize Network Insight captures micro-segmentation, which is one of the best products from VMware. The solution helps micro-segmentation achieve its purpose.

When comparing vRealize Network Insight to other solutions such as SolarWinds and other monitoring tools, vRealize Network Insight is more user-friendly.

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.

The network assurance is great. 

It's useful for analyzing networks.

The product offers good data integration with other products as well.

It's a very powerful, very manageable product. 

The initial setup is simple. 

It has a very nice user interface and is user-friendly.

In some integrations with other products like F5, Cisco, and others, we sometimes encounter some bugs, and we sometimes have some integration issues that require us to contact VMware support to try to solve the problems. We'd like the simplification of integrations in the future.

Support could be much better. They do not do a good job of finding issues. 

The security could be enhanced slightly.

We've used the solution for almost two years. 

It's a stable product. We do not find it to be excessively buggy or glitchy. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. In some projects, we deploy it as clusters, and it works out well. It depends on the customer's environment. 

We've had issues in the past. In two cases, we have some clients who had issues, and we weren't given any solution to the problems. They are both still ongoing issues. 

When customers do not speak English well, there are also issues with communication. They need to take a bit more time with non-native speakers. 

Neutral

I do not have experience with any other products at this time. 

This is not a hard solution to set up. It's very straightforward and quite simple. I'd rate the ease of setup a five out of five. 

I tend to deploy the solution in customer environments. 

I don't know about the licensing of the VRNI, and I'm on the deployment side of the product. The sales teams deal with pricing. 

It's my understanding that the price is per device. I'm not 100% sure, however.

We are a VMware business partner in Turkey.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

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 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.