VMware NSX Reviews

We can deliver the network that customers need quickly and safely. That is most important.

There is one feature I'm finding with VMware which is special for us from IBM with JIRA routing protocols. This is in the future that they are planning, especially right now with our compatible AWS. AWS is good, understood, except for the software to improve, probably with Amazon right now doing this partnership. VMware and access are going to be improved for that.

It's totally stable, because right now it's running version 6.3. It's very mature. Even the versions with VMware 5.5, 6, and 6.5 are very stable right now. It's becoming more open to other environments, too. It's not only working with VMware, but also with Red Hat and Ubuntu. It's an amazing product.

Totally scalable. I almost can tell this is the first real multi-tenant product from VMware that will scale out and do real multitenancy.

Tech support is nice. It could be a little bit better. Simple, since this is a new product, you don't have too much specialists over the world. Because it is a mix between the virtual world with VMs, and now networks, it's networking virtualization. So, VMware with NSX is being a pioneer. They are improving their support every day.

NSX gives us the ability to put our network, NSX, onto any network there is, which allows us not to have to go to the network team to create networks our VLANs for networks. We can just create all our networks right from the start. Whenever we want to spin something up, we just spin it up.

So far, what I've seen here at VMworld, it seems to be improving just the same line as everything else. It's going to expand, grow and grow and grow. It's going everywhere. It's not just going into "I'm using the V version of NSX," but it's going out to every environment. It's going out to all the clouds so that even if you have the V, you can also use the cloud part and put it into there, so it seems to be growing where it needs to go.

It still needs to grow. There are still some features that it doesn't do, like it doesn't do multicasting. It does do some multicasting, but it's within their own infrastructure, but multicasting in general, it doesn't do.

So far, it's been very stable. I've used it since the very beginning and it's been very stable in the beginning, and as they've added more and more features, it's become more and more stable in the environment; that is, better in the environment because we're able to use more and more features within it.

So far it's been very scalable, and with the new versions that are coming out, it's even more and more scalable. They've added more and more features of routing that they didn't have in the first versions, which allow it to be more scalable. It's become better than the actual infrastructure, the original network infrastructure that's there, because we can lay it on anything and it will scale to any part of the network that we want.

So far, I've had very good tech support. A lot of the guys we talk to are very knowledgeable, and if they don't know it, they're able to talk to others within their group that will know it. So I've gotten very good results from them.

The installation is very straightforward. The part that gets complex is how you do your routing, how you do your ESGs, how you set up the actual network itself within it. But once it's set up, you just create virtual switches and put any network you want on it. It becomes almost seamless.

In terms of criteria for selecting a vendor, it's a little of everything. It's the reputation that they have, but it's also more of the tech support, as well as the documentation that they have, because not everybody in their environment, as well as your own environment, knows everything. So you have to be able to look up stuff and have that knowledge to be able to do it, as well as allow them to do it.

They have a lot of good KB articles on what's going on, so if you need a problem solved, you look at that first and you'll be able to find it pretty easily.

I sell to a lot of customers in the DoD. NSX has really become part of their ecosystem, especially for the tactical customers in the DoD. It's very important for them to have small footprints and have as much services in their servers, as possible. NSX has fit this role really well for them.

• Going through and getting more features sets from the routing protocols is definitely necessary for the future.
• Being able to properly manipulate BGP
• Getting multiprotocol BGP into the stack
• A little bit better redistribution

As a CCIE, I like to have all my tool sets, and there are some things which NSX is missing right now.

It's missing some more advanced features. As an engineer, we need those tools. We need to be able to manipulate routes. We need to be able to set traffic the way that we need it to be. Especially as we interact with other vendors, sometimes it makes it difficult to have to do some workarounds. Once VMware flushes out the RFC for things like BGP and OSPF, it will be better.

We've tested it in our labs, and our customers are running it now. It is definitely stable, and it does what it's supposed to with no unnecessary crashes.

It's one of the major benefits of it. The distributed nature of NSX is really what the customers are interested in: spread into workloads across a lot of servers and not working out one host too hard.

All my customers seem to be very happy with the technical support. Anytime they call up, everything is very responsive and the engineers are intelligent. They know how to help them solve their problems.

NSX is one of the simplest network solutions that I've ever worked with.

I did a demo for our company's engineers about a year ago, and in 45 minutes, I stood up a cluster and had the VXLAN and some of the firewall policies, up and running in a 45-minute demo. It's really easy to use and everybody walked away from it knowing how to use NSX just from a 45-minute presentation.

It's very important for us to have good relationships with VMware from a reseller standpoint, and especially in the DoD, we have great reps. VMware is probably a 90% of the DoD networks. It's definitely not just reputation-wise, but they've been there for seven to eight years now and everybody knows that VMware is the enterprise solution for virtualization in the DoD.

Some of NSX's most valuable features are:

• Its distributed firewall
• The we can actually extend Layer 2 networking across datacenters, and also Layer 3 networking, which comes along with it.
• The routing and switching.

They could branch out to the physical layer. Today, it's just the virtual layer, and they're starting to talk about the physical layer. We'd like to see the physical layer incorporated.

We've been using NSX now with Layer 2 stretching for approximately 10 months. We're getting ready to really ramp up the DFW, which is the distributed firewall piece, which we and our security team are very excited about.

NSX is a very stable product.

We've already scaled it across two data centers. We'll be incorporating two additional data centers, to give us that footprint, or IP address migration across four data centers. So, it's quite scalable.

The tech support for NSX is awesome. We are a premier production customer for VMware, therefore the tech support and the tech support representatives don't start a lower level. We start at the mid-level of the tech support engineers. Thus, we get answers very quickly. We also work with our technical account manager who knows what we're doing and what we've got coming up, so he's able to push things for us on the tech support side.

Our tech support's awesome.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor (like VMware), it's important to us that they have the following:

• Their name recognition.
• The support that they provide.
• Their placement in the industry as a leader.
• The things that they're doing with NSX, which are phenomenal.

We're a supporter of VMware, and likewise they're a supporter and a partner with us and what we're doing.

It's really a great product. It fits all of our needs. Everything that we've asked it to do or asked VMware to help us get done with it, we've been able to do. Therefore, we're very excited about the product.

The most valuable part of NSX is it's very scalable and automated. Our change request time is really low.

For the most part, it's very stable.

The only hiccup is sometimes during an upgrade, there are hurdles that you can have during that time, but overall it's very stable.

Since we're almost 100% virtual, it's been very scalable for us.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to get to a higher level engineer if you need to, but it takes some work to make that case. Usually it happens, but it's a little difficult.

It seems to be very straightforward. Usually a lot of it's handled by the installer. Yeah, very straightforward. As long as you read the design guide, it's easy.

An important reason for selecting was VMware because they're the hypervisor we use and we see them to be a very valuable asset in purchasing something like NSX, and because they're the owner of the hypervisor and they have direct access into the hypervisor. That's very valuable for us. We foresee it being a very reliable product into the future.

An important reason for selecting was VMware because they're the hypervisor we use and we see them to be a very valuable asset in purchasing something like NSX, and because they're the owner of the hypervisor and they have direct access into the hypervisor. That's very valuable for us. We foresee it being a very reliable product into the future.

They developed the hypervisor, which is very valuable to us, because it has saved us a lot of money just on the micro-segmentation piece. That's basically all we use at this point, but the product has more than paid for itself just with that part of the product.

NSX is extremely invaluable from the standpoint of security.

It does have capabilities of micro-segmenting a network, being able to create smaller segments of various types of applications separated by various tiers.

However, what it's mostly important for is being able to actually set security policies right at the interfacing virtual machine, which we haven't had the ability to do in the past.

So the third-party marketplace is growing and growing for this product and being able to redirect traffic to them, to the third-party products in order to take advantage of those additional features, is wonderful.

I think that one of the more important things to see better integrated into the NSX product would be an IDS/IPS type solution, which right now we're handing off to a third-party, which sometimes doubles the cost of the product. However, there are new products that we're learning about over the course of this week like AppDefense, that may actually help provide some additional capabilities in terms of that IDS/IPS type structure.

There are elements that have been added to it over the years, but its history goes way back with vShield, and has been included in products like vCloud Director, etc. To be honest with you, I've deployed it over the past five to six years and I've had nothing but great success with it.

From a tech support standpoint, as with most VMware text support, the people that we get a hold of on the phone are generally very knowledgeable of the product and have the ability to actually help us through whatever issue we have. We try not to spin our wheels too much. We do try to dig in as much as we can, but as soon as we understand we've gone beyond our limitations we get them on the phone and we've never had an issue trying to get the support we need.

It's a complex product so setup is essentially as easy as the person whose knowledge is being used to install it. There are various elements to it. It can be installed in modules - in a modular fashion. You don't have to install everything right away. And, unfortunately, with this particular product, when you read through all the marketing materials it sounds like it has to be installed completely when, in fact, you can start out with only the pieces you need and add what you need - the other pieces - later as needed.

I always have a hard time giving a ten to anything. I think everything needs improvement. So that's why I would give it a solid eight out of 10.

Security. Our Trend platform runs off NSX.

We use the solution strictly for security.

Roughly six months.

We didn't have this issue, but I would recommend to others looking at this solution to make sure that their hardware is compatible.

It seems to be taking care of our whole environment. It seems to be pretty scalable.

I have not used it, but my coworker has. Every time he talks to them, they're easy to get a hold of; very knowledgeable and they solve his issues right away.

If you put in a trouble ticket, they contact you very quickly (in response). If there is a problem, it usually isn't around very long. They jump on it, fix it, and it's done.

We were on McAfee, and we switched to Trend. We switched to Trend because Trend supports virtual environment a lot better than McAfee does.

Trend migrated in a way that it will only work with NSX. The older version of Trend that we were on worked without NSX. The newer version does not. Now, we use NSX in conjunction with Trend.

We upgraded Trend to keep up-to-date and all the security loopholes closed.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• They have to be able to support the environment you're running.
• The service and support is a big must. We work at an Enterprise level, so sometimes you can't go with the little new guy. You need that 24 hour service and support, seven days a week. It is very important for us.

The ability to scale from different clouds. At the moment, the scalability of the product is the number one thing that I saw.

Right now, we're doing a private cloud, since we're government. In the future, we may want to look at public, but probably not. 

It has the potential to improve the way we function by having our different clouds be able to easily communicate back and forth. Right now, it takes a lot of work to do collaboration from our test lab, to our production, and to do anything in-between. It has the potential of giving us streamline migrations from the test lab to production.  

Pricing and licensing could be improved as we are a government entity. Lower pricing could always help.

We just got it.

About five to 10 people set new products up and we kick them down the road all the time. As soon as we see something real good we call in some users and it gets big. They call their managers and it grows; it's like a wildfire.

But it will start off as a spark, and I'm the spark.

It is pretty good. It cuts down on duplication. Right now, I have tools in the lab, have tools in pre-prod, and have tools in production. 

Right now and well in the future, if we implement it, we'll be able to have the same tool set be applied through all regions and transfer and not have duplication. It will outline and teach our users how to operate them. Therefore, we will have one set of tools, one set of instructions, and they can operate in all three environments. 

Scalability definitely looks awesome. Again the three environments we'll be able to use one set of tools. Everybody would be familiar with it. It won't operate this region and a different way in another region because it's from another vendor, where one set of tools would be able to pass throughout all of our regions. 

Our scale right now is about 60 users (the production and the customer).

We had multiple solutions.

We were making do with what we had, but again, going to different conferences and seeing what other people were using. We got curious and our vendor said, let's demo it. So, we made time for it, and after we made time for the demo, we realized we should have been doing this two years ago.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward. We did it with our government PFE.

We do have partners, who are knowledgeable, did offer to come in and set it up for us. We had access to our online lab from our vendor, so they had to set it up, connect it, demo it, and see how it runs. Though, we set ours up. 

Dell EMC and Symantec.

It's a solid product. Very easy to use out-of-the-box. It didn't have a steep learning curve, and we're still finding things that we can add-on. 

I would encourage anyone looking to buy the solution to demo it in a lab, or come to a conference and see it. They should see how it would fit in their environment, and don't be overwhelmed or overworked by adding another solution because the results pays off.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Price
• Security
• Meeting the application requirements.
• Technical support.