VMware NSX Reviews

NSX is a virtual network, and now is the right time for it. Technology-wise, it's actually an advancement in comparison with other solutions. We've been studying it, and so far, so good. NSX is the superior product when it comes to software for virtualized networks.

The non-enterprise version of the solution should be improved.

I want to see the solution expand to more than just the network, for example, perhaps it could provide some VLAN technologies.

I have been distributing this solution for over six years.

I believe the product is very stable.

The product is very scalable. I don't think NSX would have any problems with growth if a company wanted to expand their network and business. One person is enough to manage this solution.

Here in the Philippines, we need more technical support. I don't think they have good support here. There aren't any experts on NSX, only the distributor and reseller, so we have to really invest in training for us to able to understand the product.

Our team is already trained, so the setup is straightforward.

The licensing is renewed every three years. The cost for implementation and renovation are a huge portion of that price.

I think they need to market the solution more so that it can be accessible to more customers, because few are very familiar with it. It's hard to market it because we are provided with less marketing information about it, but in order to grow the product, it has to be properly marketed.

If you are looking for new technology of the future, NSX is one of them, and it will cost you less in power consumption since it's a virtual network as opposed to a pure physical network, which consumes more energy. That's a main advantage, that the operating expense will lessen while at the same time, the technology is great and is a secure network. When you're talking about virtual networks, I think NSX is one of the greatest products and will soon be the leader in the market.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of ten.

What I found most valuable is the security offered by VMware NSX. I also like that it is a feature-rich product.

VMware NSX should be able to scale for different customers, even the big ones. Its scalability needs improvement. Stability for it should also be improved.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of this product is for it to have more integration with other public clouds.

I have concerns on the stability of VMware NSX, because it breaks multiple times in customer environments, especially when you scale it across a big data center.

VMware NSX still has a lot of scalability limitations, and needs improvement on how it can scale.

The support for VMware NSX has not been good recently. Some of their experienced staff have left the company, and that has impacted all their business units, including support.

VMware NSX is straightforward to install and configure, but for a user who's new to it, the product can be somewhat complex to understand, though not too complex.

The pricing model for VMware NSX is good, especially because it has a lot of features.

VMware NSX is a good product. It's the best solution in terms of the Enterprise FTN.

I'm quite competent on this product, because I've been working on it for a long time, so I find it easier to use.

I'm rating VMware NSX nine out of ten.

This product is a software-defined data center with a cloud-native approach. We mainly use it for application migration of some of the architecture to containerized solutions.

The management platform is great. I really like the management dashboard, the tailor-made assurance, the telemetry, and the ease of integration with all other solutions of VMware, such as vSphere. They also integrate well with other third-party security platforms. It's very easy to give an integration of the cloud tenant of NSX. It's very easy to build and migrate a cloud project.

It's very complex. However, I don't work directly with it typically.

We had started two projects for integration with OpenShift and OpenStack with NSX. It was declared by VMware that this is possible, however, the process is very tricky. The full integration was delayed to wait for a new official release. I don't know the actual stage, as this is something that happened more than a year or two ago. It was the beginning of the pandemic. In any case, the integration with OpenShift, the open-source cloud platform, at the time was in need of work and was (and remains) something required from our customers. 

They have to work more and more on the integration for public cloud services and have cyber security platform integration.

I've been using the solution for about five years. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

It seems to scale. However, we don't have enough data in order to say how much clients scale out or the performance when a company is trying to scale out an NSX-T environment. We are not a cloud provider. We don't have a cloud environment to test it.

In terms of who is using it on our side, we have about five to seven people who have the operational capability on NSX-T. 

In our organization, we use only a small NSX-T cluster. We have a bigger one for our lab. I can't speak to the usage of our customers where we deployed it.

We're pretty satisfied with technical support.

We previously used OpenShift together with OpenStack. It's a different platform. One is open-source and the other is a commercial platform with vendor support and established customers.

The initial setup is very simple. It's not overly complex.

All the VMware platforms are really easy to implement. They require knowledge, of course. However, if you follow the procedure, the output is good.

The deployment itself doesn't take more than two or three days. 

That said, we have knowledgeable workers that have done NSX and the previous release (not the NSX-T). They have done deployments several times. That's why, each time, it's really easy to do. If you have to do that in a customer production environment, it will take say no more than one week including both the deployment in production and the training for the customer.

We have three people that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. 

I can handle the implementation myself. We also have trained people inside our organization. We don't need the assistance of integrators or consultants.

I can't speak to the exact licensing costs of the solution.

Most deployments are on-premises or via a private cloud in the case of enterprise clients.

We started several deployments with NSX-T version 3. I can't speak to which version we are on currently.

It works and it is powerful in terms of governance, telemetry, ease of use, and ease of deployment. The operation is very simple. Of course, you have to train someone in order to use it effectively. It's very easy to find training. For us, it's good to have a third party with enough experience in order to support other projects where we don't have enough people in order to do that.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Have used this solution to implement PAS (PCF) and have also used it for Native Datacenter networking as part of DC refresh.

Have worked on multiple organizations with VMware NSX. It heavily depends on the use case of the solution and how well you are able to use all the features of the product. When using for K8s container platforms or a networking backed for on premises cloud using a CMP(VRA, VIO) then VMware NSX is the best SDN solution but If an organization is not able to use NSX to its full potential (Switching, Routing, Load-balancing, Firewall, IDS, IPS etc.) then its not worth it.

Logical routing, switching are  overall good feature of this SDN solution especially when using CMP's and distributed firewall is very attractive features for micro-segmentation.

In rare situation there are  mismatch in the control plane data and dataplane data i.e. the details and what you actually see on the transport note. This is rare but time consuming to troubleshoot . Additionally, there could be better integration between VMware Cloud Federation (VCF) and NSX-T. Currently, there are some limitations, for example, VCF allows just one overlay transport zone. Also there is not upgrade path from VCF 3(NSX-T 2.5.x) to VCF 4 (NSX-T 3.x)

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The stability is good and is getter better after each new release.

The solution is scalable. In the 2.4 version, the controller got merged to create the cluster manager, it now is even better.

The technical support was pretty good, but recently I have had quite a few bad experiences with the support. But that really depends on the account and geographic location and multiple other factors

We have using Cisco ACI  and it is a strong competitor. When you are not using NSX NCP then everything that you need from SDN prospective can be done in Cisco ACI except for the distributed firewall at the vnic level.

The initial installation feels at first a little complex because there are a lot of components, but when you get the understanding after a short time, it is fine.

I was not involved in the purchase of the solution but I hear it is on the expensive side. That is why quite a few companies are moving towards open source because there are multiple solutions such as NginX, that can do the load balancing, and Calico and Flannel can do your logical switching routing.

If there is already VMware environment then it makes sense to use NSX-V, NSX-T as it can be integrated with other VMware automation products. But if approach it towards opensource then other SDN solutions like flannel, Nginx etc. can be evaluated depending on the use case.

If you are wanting to implement this solution I would advise if your project supports it then definitely. You should have a solid use case, the solution is rich in feature sets and you should use all of them. Then only is it worth the money, if you are just buying it for your logical switching and routing, then it is not worth it.

I rate VMware NSX a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution in order to build a private cloud.

I'm not using it directly. Basically, for me, this is just another tool in the portfolio. I'm not the engineering staff that are next to the console and doing configurations.

Overall, I would say the solution has been quite stable.

The solution is likely scalable.

I haven't heard of any problems with the solution.

Any technical product has its own limitations in one place or another.

Our technical team is always looking for the solutions that they work with to offer more convenient integrations.

I've been using the solution for around a year or so. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

There are some limitations in terms of scaling. It depends on how you would like to scale. Our engineers are using it and they don't see any problems with the scaling, however, it doesn't mean the same will work for any other organization.

Currently, we have more than 10,000 end-users. Our technical team isn't really that big. However, I can't say the exact number.

We do plan to continue to use the solution, however, we don't have plans for any big expansion.

I do not have any personal experience with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful, knowledgeable, or responsive they are.

I cannot say if there was a different solution used in our organization. It had been implemented before I arrived.

I didn't handle the initial installation. I can't speak to how easy or difficult it was to implement, or how long it took to deploy. I wasn't a part of the process.

I'm not involved in the licensing process at all. I have no knowledge of how long our licenses last or how much it costs the company.

We are just a customer and end-user. We don't have a business relationship with VMware.

We use a few different VMware products, not just NSX.

We aren't necessarily using the latest version of the solution. We usually use the latest minus one or two versions.

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been mostly quite please with it.

The solution is a software-defined firewall. You can set the policies and filter the incoming traffic from our site to our network. Any hostile request coming from an external network will get blocked. 

The most valuable and unique feature of the solution is Micro-segmentation achieving better security, through enabling security architects to divide data centre into different segments. One being the VMS withing the on-premises, the other one on the Cloud.

There could be an improvement in regards to security. This solution cannot migrate all assets smoothly and continuously, for example, the host

Sometimes the physical hosts are not able to be converted into virtual ones, which needs to be fixed. 

I have been using the solution since 2012.

We have many users in our organization. There are approximately 50 administration and more than 300 users using this solution.

We also use NSX-T alongside this solution. NSX started with micro-segmentation and the other option is based on a different architecture with some differences.

The installation is straightforward, it took a couple of hours.

The deployment happened base on the deployment topology that is defined by the security architect. I did the deployment by myself. 

This solution requires a licence. 

I have used other firewalls in the past. 

I recommend this solution and I am going to continue using it in the future.

I rate VMware NSX a nine out of ten. 

The Environment was an active-active Tier-0 multi-site deployment (primary/secondary).

It contained compute and management clusters, and a small number of transport ESXi nodes (between five and six) v6.7u2, vCenter 6.7u2, AD.

The primary use case was to implement micro-segmentation and route production workloads through NSX-T via BGP. Our customer needed assurances that BGP routing within NSX-T would be efficient.

We implemented a very simple architecture and setup site with one NSX Manager as the primary source. This was a financial customer, thus security was the main item.

We had to explain to the customer that NSX-T deployment and micro-segmentation were two different projects explicitly.

NSX-T has allowed us to implement micro-segmentation in the customer's environment seamlessly (zero-trust). We have also looked at deploying Tufin or Gardicore, ReSTNSX as alternative tools. The Environment was an active-active Tier-0 multi-site deployment

The organization was able to begin scaling out its production workloads and clusters.

From a security standpoint, the customer was able to better secure critical workloads while routing L2/L3 worked normally, giving them more confidence that they would be ready for any potential security incident mitigation or outage (DR).

The most valuable features are:

• N-VDS Geneve encapsulation L2/L3
• Less need for the VM to hit the TOR switch to communicate with VMs on the same ESXi host/segment (logical switch)
• Micro-segmentation capabilities/tagging
• NSX-T dashboard/compute usage across the configuration allows a quick view
• The NSX-T configuration screens are fairly easy to navigate but they might need to simplify them a bit in future versions.
• Very extensive detailed configuration items can be set in Uplink profiles to better map pNICs
• Edge TEP and Host TEP tunnel config and troubleshooting is much more understandable and verifiable

Traffic flow introspection topology visibility is definitely needed because at the moment, NSX-T lacks in this area.

A hardware scan of the ESXi host for possible incompatibilities should be added to NSX-T/vSphere, as it would allow us to know in advance, for example, if a pNIC is not compatible with a version of vSphere before moving forward with an NSX-T deployment. 

It needs a better, integrated migration tool. Something like RestNSX with more elaborate capabilities from a troubleshooting perspective and pre-migration perspective would be an improvement.

I have used this solution version most recently, as it has not been out that long.

Many companies are moving to v3 and v3.01

N-VDS will be depreciated in newer versions and integrated within the standard VDS

From a recoverability standpoint, if designed correctly and perhaps if VMware SRM is integrated with NSX-T, it would help the stability of workload availability.

From a routing perspective, NSX-T must be designed for redundancy with cross/overlapping uplinks from the edge nodes to your L3 upstream devices. Routing will be more reliable with default routes in place. Hardware compute and compatibility with the solution is critical for good communication via the  nsx overlay network.  Overall this solution is very scalable

NSX-T is extremely scalable as a solution. Make sure that you plan your IP pools accordingly in advance if you plan to add many transport ESXi nodes in the future.

VMware Global support for NSX-T/V is exceptional.

We have never used any other solution. NSX is the premier product in this space.

The initial setup will go smoothly if the design of the solution was done correctly. 

NSX-T can be complex if the discovery phase was not granular enough.

We implemented it with an in-house team.

Customers will better be able to determine ROI once they have been running the solution for a year or so. How much they will have from the Capex perspective will have to be calculated.

My advice is to make sure that you properly scope the project from both hardware and network requirements. NSX-T can be complicated if it is not designed correctly.

Some customers are evaluating Gardicore vs NSX.

Gardicore is a great tool for micro-segmentation only. It can fill in many gaps that NSX-T misses with its native micro-seg capabilities.

An NSX-T solution requires a solid understanding of routing/switching, IP pools, local egress, and solution design to be successful. It takes a team of both VMware and Cisco folks to collaborate to get it done right the first time.

As a customer, make sure you are hiring the best resources.

We use this product for micro-segmentation and network function virtualization.

This is the most scalable product of its type.

It is very good for automation and software-defined networking.

I would like to see improvements made to the certification process. As it is now, you have to do the training with VMware itself, and you have to spend a lot of money doing it, which is very discouraging. 

If you compare other certifications especially from the cloud providers, you can get trained from your choice of training providers and not very expensive or learn on your own at your pace, prepare for exams and pass and your certificate will be issued. In contrast, you have to register under VMware to get training done at minimum of $3000 before your certificate is issued to you. The training costs a minimum of $3,000, which is expensive and should be reduced. 

I have been using this product for more than a year.

Outside of the cloud infrastructure, it is the most scalable network product that I have worked with. It is used in a server farm that contains about 2,000 servers.

We have not needed to contact technical support.

We did not use another network function virtualization product prior to this one.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Our deployment took three months, end to end.

We had a consultant to assist us with the deployment.

We have two or three in-house staff who manage and maintain the solution.

The licensing fees are expensive and we pay on a yearly basis. However, we were able to leverage some of the licenses that we had for an affiliated product, ESXi. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We chose VMware NSX-T because it was the most scalable.

This is a good product and one that I recommend for anybody who does not want to change their existing infrastructure. The problem is that they have to compete with the likes of AWS and cloud providers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.