VMware NSX Reviews

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.

We aren't a service-based company, so in terms of improvement, VMware NSX hasn't improved our company, but we need it for business purposes because we do have clients who give us all these products, and they tell us to evaluate these products in our environment and then give them reports on those products. VMware NSX is a good product, but for us, the solution doesn't add that much value to our organization.

Though I haven't been working a lot on VMware NSX, it's good to have. What I like the most about it is that its console is good, and it doesn't take a lot of effort in terms of doing my daily tasks on it or what it's meant for. VMware NSX is still a preferred product in the market.

An area for improvement in VMware NSX is that it uses up more resources and is heavy on the network.

What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is more automation.

I've been using VMware NSX for more than two years now.

VMware NSX is a stable solution. It's very reliable.

VMware NSX, In terms of scalability, particularly at the enterprise level, is hectic. It's a complex process if you want to scale it compared to its competitors. It still depends, for example, if you've been in VM all your life or if you have been a VM administrator for a long time, you'll take comfort in something new, so people tend to go for it. If it's a new customer, an upgrade, or if the entire organization is going through a revamp, the process is quite complex. On a scale of one to five, I'll rate the scalability of VMware NSX a four.

VMware NSX has great support, and I have no complaints about it. The support for this solution is reasonable.

The initial setup for VMware NSX was pretty straightforward. In terms of our implementation plan, mostly we have standard SOPs that we have laid down for our implementation teams and we stick to those. It would still depend on the environment where we're going to execute it, for example, it could be on-premises or on the cloud, and we'd also take into consideration which type of cloud they have and what other technologies they have in their environment, so based on all of those, the implementation plan and how we're going to approach the implementation changes.

How long the deployment of VMware NSX takes would depend on the client, the environment, and the requirements, but for the basic setup or initial setup where we would just get the box and the do configuration, the IP, etc., that doesn't take more than four to five days.

Our deployment model for VMware NSX used to be on-premises, but now the deployment is mostly on the public cloud.

We used consultants for the implementation of VMware NSX.

I'm unable to give information on the pricing or licensing cost of VMware NSX because I've never been someone who looks into the economic part of any security or virtualization solutions. That's handled by an entirely different team, and I don't even have the slightest idea about the costs associated with the solution, though I've heard pricing for VMware NSX is on the higher side.

We haven't evaluated other virtualization solutions apart from VMware NSX.

VMware NSX is a solution I use at the company very often. My company is a partner of VMware and I analyze products such as the VMware NSX, and I give a detailed report on how the features are, what are the differences between the solution and its competitors, etc.

Deploying VMware NSX requires a team of four, but it would still depend on the skillset. For example, two people can do the work where one is in charge of the networking and one would act as a backup. Currently, my team of five users works on VMware NSX.

My advice to others looking into implementing the solution is to first go through the POC and the documentation before purchasing VMware NSX. Get to know the features best and find out what works for your organization and what doesn't, then take a calculated decision on whether you need the solution because some VMware solutions would be quite heavy on your environment if you are a mid-level enterprise. Other than that, VMware is a trusted name, and it has been in the market for quite some time now, and it's reliable. Though you should also evaluate other solutions, especially in terms of pricing because what I've heard is that VMware NSX is on the higher end, so it depends on what type of fees you want to check off your list. After evaluating all these factors, only then should you make that decision whether you want to go for VMware NSX or not.

My rating for VMware NSX on a scale of one to ten is seven, particularly for virtualization. Technology-wise and implementation-wise, I'm giving the solution a seven.

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten if it was less complex and had more automation. Currently, it's on the heavier side, for example, even the basic agent or basic software takes up a lot of space at the end-user level. VMware NSX should utilize fewer resources when it sits in your environment, so all the other users or other solutions in the environment would have ample resources to use. The solution shouldn't be heavy on the network.

My company is a partner but not a reseller of VMware NSX.

We use the solution mainly for micro-segmentation and to permit security on flat networks without a V-LAN.

I have found the system to be very intuitive, functional, and they have great technology.

One of the areas that we are struggling with is how do we perform the same security level as we had for an NSX solution for the legacy system. For example, if I have a switch, and I am connecting a legacy application on the legacy system that does not support the hyper vision or another feature, is possible to push the security topic to the switches to be compliant, or compliant with an NSX component, and to perform the same security level as we perform for hyper vision side. It would be beneficial for us if there was better integration with legacy systems.

In the future, the solution should be compliant with internet NIC. They could deploy this NIC into some switches, servers, or other product. It would be interesting to have this sort of NIC stamped by VMware, and we could push some security feature into it. It would be a very useful feature. I do understand VMware is virtual and not on a physical device path but this would be a good endeavour.

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The solution is completely stable.

The solution is highly scalable. One of the biggest infrastructures we have deployed the solution in has approximately 70,000 people using the solution.

The installation has been complex.

This solution can be very complex to deploy. We have assembled complex deployments at a few huge network site. We work for several customers in the communication and industrial sectors that have complex environments.

The price is based on the virtual desktop infrastructure(VDI) side and also is dependant on the size of the environment. The price is expensive and it could attract more purchasers in smaller organisations if it was reduced.

I would definitely recommend this solution to others. I have deployed it in many different types of environments and it operates well.

I rate VMware NSX an eight out of ten.

Our primary use cases of this solution are hybrid, cloud, private cloud, and automation.

VMware NSX has improved our customers' organizations through its automation of security policies, delivery of policy by intent, rapid provisioning, and removing security as being a blocker.

Microsegmentation and automation are two features we have found to be the most valuable. 
The microsegmentation feature is a mature feature used in NSX-V and NSX-T.

We are trialing Layer 4 and 7 load balancing with this solution, as it's very new.

The next release of NSX should try to make Kubernetes and container integration a little easier than it is now. It's quite a complicated process.

I would rate this solution an eight because it doesn't have Kubernetes integrations yet, and it isn't multi-federated. Those are some of the things that need to be added to the product. 

This solution is stable and robust. We've done failover testing and it kept working. 

I have found this solution to be scalable, more so now with NSX-T than NSX-V.

Their technical support team is firm. It's mature, and they've got a good support team.

Business is demanding more agility and capability than ever before. NSX offers solutions to those business-level problems.

The initial setup was straightforward. You just have to click it and follow the manuals. Deploying the infrastructure code can be more complex.

We looked at Nuage and Cisco. We decided to go with NSX because they have a good understanding and a strong VMware stack.

I would advise a colleague at another company who is researching NSX to know how the technology can answer their customer's business use cases. For those who say NSX is complex, I would agree that it can be complex but you can abstract that complexity through automation and Service Catalogs to make it easier for end-users to consume.

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.

The full integration has been great. Its infrastructure and its ability to be part of the whole application are very useful for organizations. 

The solution is great for controlling virtual switches and it is easy to establish VLANs and micro-segmentations. All those things are very useful.

The stability is pretty good. 

Overall, for me, it's a good solution and has been working well. 

I cannot recall coming across any missing features. At this time, there is nothing I would need in a future release. 

Occasionally the licensing is not very clear. They should make it easier to understand. 

I have experience using the solution for around 25 years, on IT, however, for the last 10 years I've been working deeply on this and over the decade I have been more focused on software. In the last 4 or 5 years, I have had more and more focus. 

The stability is good. Our customers don't seem to have any issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

I haven't really dealt with scaling the solution. I can't speak to how it is. 

I've never been in contact with technical support in the past. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

I also have experience using Red Hat. However, sometimes I have had some problems with it. It can be a bit more difficult in terms of integration with other vendors. 

I didn't actually handle the implementation. I'm working more on the design side, not on setup or configuration. Therefore, I can't speak to how easy or difficult the implementation process is for users. 

The licensing is complex. Sometimes I have trouble understanding it.

We are VMware integrators and partners. 

I'd advise new or potential users to be aware that you will have to integrate it with other solutions. You'll need to look at how it fits in with all of your infrastructure, including IT infrastructure, for example. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's been very good overall. 

VMware NSX is used for micro-segmentation. If you have a virtual VMware pool, then you can segment them separately. It is similar to a firewall for virtual micro-segmentation.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

I have found the solution to be stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have never had to call technical support, the solution has been good.

We have done three installations and we have not had any critical issues. The time it took for the installation was approximately two days. However, they should provide better documentation.

We have two engineers that do the implementation and maintenance of the solution.

The solution is free and the price for the support can be expensive.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware NSX a five out of ten.