vRealize Network Insight

vRealize Network Insight or vRNI is the newest addition to the range of products from VMware. vRealize Network Insight integrates with VMware's network virtualization platform, NSX. vRNI delivers intelligent operations for your software defined network environment. vRNI does for your virtualized network what vRealize Operations does for your virtualized environment, but only to the SDN environment. With the help of this product you can optimize network performance and availability with visibility and analytics across virtual and physical networks. Provide planning and recommendations for implementing micro-segmentation security, plus operational views to quickly and confidently manage and scale VMware NSX deployment.

Let's take a step back and discuss, briefly, what VMware NSX is and why you should, as a technologist, care about it. 

​NSX is an innovative approach to solving long-standing network provisioning bottlenecks within the data center, and it allows for the integration of switching, routing and upper-layer services into an integrated application and network orchestration platform. With an overlay solution that may not require hardware upgrades, NSX offers customers a potentially quicker way of taking advantage of SDN capabilities by decoupling the network from hardware into a software abstraction layer allowing the end-user to programmatically create, provision and manage networks. 

Essentially, NSX is doing for your network what vSphere did for your compute environments and we have typically virtualized the compute and storage with vSAN, so adding network virtualization brings the full vision of SDDC giving you a lot of benefits like single pain of glass to manage your environments within vCenter, which a lot of us are already familiar with.

​With NSX you gain visibility into your network that you may not have today while allowing for division of duties in a secure manner. NSX technology inception is on the rise and as of today, VMware has over 2,600 customers that have implemented NSX and over 50% increase in license bookings. 

You can learn more on NSX from a previous blog here. ​

You might be familiar with vRealize Network Assessment (vNA) and be asking yourself, what is the difference between vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) and vRealize Network Assessment (vNA)? The difference is that vNA only gives you the report/preview portion of the product, which takes 30-minutes to install. It takes more time to install the full-product. vNA only needs to connect to the vCenter and can be ran with a Solutions Provider like Rotla Advizex. vRNI, in addition to the vCenter, you also need to connect it the hardware, firewalls, etc.

As mentioned above vRNI addresses the need for deeper, richer NSX operation and traffic analytics in the fast growing virtual networking market. vRNI transforms operations for NSX based on SDDC across your virtual, physical, and cloud.

Key Benefits:

• Model security groups and distributed firewall rules.
  • Comprehensive net flow assessment and analysis to model security groups and firewall rules
  • Recommendations to make micro-segmentation easier to deploy
  • Continuously monitor and audit compliance postures over time

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• 360-degree visibility and analytics virtual & physical network
  • Virtual and physical network topology mapping.
  • Performance Optimization across Overlay and Underlay
  • Log Analytics (with vRealize Log Insight for NSX, included with all NSX licenses)
• Natural language search capabilities and Offers Best Practices, Health and Availability of NSX Deployment
  • Intuitive UI, Natural language search to quickly pinpoint issues
  • Log Analytics for troubleshooting
  • Best practice compliance checking (such as configuration errors in mismatch segment ID, IPset definitions, etc.)
    
    

vRNI ensures the health and availability of your NSX deployments, giving you confidence that your data center is protected on every level and giving you insight into how the environment is performing. With vRNI your organization can optimize network performance and availability with true visibility and analytics across both virtual and physical networks.
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Using vRNI and vNA, Rolta Advizex can help remove the guesswork from micro-segmentation deployments with a global net flow assessment, gain operational insights needed to quickly and confidentially manage and scale your NSX deployment with vRealize Network Insight.

What's New in 3.4
VMware recently updated vRealize Network Insight on June 01, 2017.
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The new and enhanced features in this release are as follows:

• AWS Public Cloud Support
  vRealize Network Insight now provides visibility into native AWS constructs such as VPC, VM, Security Group, and Firewall rules. Traffic flows are also analyzed to provide security and micro-segmentation view of cloud workloads (Enterprise edition only).
• Configurable Data Retention
  vRealize Network Insight provides ability to modify the data retention periods for problem events, configuration changes, and metrics (Enterprise edition only).
• Support for Physical Devices in Application Modeling
  vRealize Network Insight now allows the inclusion of physical servers in application tier definition and micro-segmentation planning.
• New NSX Operation Events
  Additional NSX operations alerts have been introduced in this release.
• Customization of Alerts
  The customization is done through global macro settings as well as at individual alerts level.
• Support of vCenter Tags and Annotations
  It is an additional way to group virtual machines into security and application groups.
• Visibility of Physical Layer-2 Network
  From this release onwards, the layer-2 networks are visible in the VM-to-VM path dashboard.
• Addition of Syslog Messages
  vRealize Network Insight supports syslog messages for sending the events generated by the system to external log management products (including Log Insight).

Resources:

• vRealize Network Insight 3.4 Release Notes
• vRealize Network Insight Download
• vRealize Network Insight Installation Guide
• vRealize Network Insight 3.0 User Guide
• vRealize Network Insight 3.4 Frequently Asked Questions