vRealize Network Insight - The Power it brings

I happen to do some hands-on for vRealize Network Insight (VRNI) yesterday and realized how powerful this tool is. 
So far in all our discussions with customers we talk about how micro-segmentation and security brings in so many benefits to customer but the ball drops when we come to plan and architect the deployment for NSX.
That's because, migrating a brown-field setup and introducing NSX in an existing environment needs a deep level analysis of existing network infrastructure, layout, policies etc. Its a humongous exercise in itself, thus for architects to craft the best design it takes in a lot of efforts and due diligence. This is where VRNI comes into picture.

One of the major use cases and benefits of VRNI as i see is, it allows you to do most granular level assessment of Network in your Datacenter. It gives you visibility and analytics across virtual and physical networks. It shows complete packet walk, data path between 2 tiers, 2 zone, 2 PGs or 2 components (as you may want to see) of your Datacenter.

This makes it very useful and easy for Network & Security architects to design the environment by effectively planning using the recommendation around micro-segmentation security.

Besides this it also helps in ensuring that the NSX deployment is healthy and operational the way it should be. If there are any glitches in implementation like maybe overlapping firewall rules - it would highlight them straight up for the admin to remediate them.

Taken at VMworld 2016 Las Vegas

VMware at VMworld 2016 announced the new Cross Cloud Architecture using VMware Cloud Foundation. The architecture allows you to extend your private cloud workloads to the public cloud along with Management, Governance and Security extension across public clouds including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud.




One of the challenges which Cloud Foundation allows us to over come is Network and Security extension from Private to Public clouds. VRNI is the tool which runs in the background which does the assessment/designing of security policies on the Public cloud workloads and make changes to it to matching with Private cloud.

We should see some cool labs around the same coming up VMware HOL soon, so suggest stay tuned.