Available now: The Validated Solutions Engineering team is excited to announce the general availability of our newest solution Intelligent Network Visibility for VMware Cloud Foundation.
New to VMware Validated Solutions?
A VMware Validated Solution is a well-architected and validated implementation, built and tested by VMware to help drive business value for VMware Cloud Foundation customers. Bridging the gap between just deployed and ready-to-consume. All VMware Validated Solutions include a structured approach to getting up and running quickly and efficiently which include planning and preparation, design objectives and design decisions, implementation, operational and solution interoperability guidance. In addition, many of our solutions offer the ability for much of the solution to be deployed via automation.
What is Intelligent Network Visibility for VMware Cloud Foundation?
In today’s ever changing IT world, businesses operate complex application and network landscapes, and the need to gain insights and visibility into these environments has increased. The ability to quickly gain clarity into a network issue allows these events to be resolved quickly and efficiently, whereas the alternative could be many hours or longer in troubleshooting efforts and lost productivity. From an application perspective, having the view into which VMs are part of a larger application, provides IT-Ops the ability to efficiently understand which VMs are communicating together and on which ports and protocols as well as better plan security constraints to keep that larger application secure. This is all done by the collection of flow data on the network transports within the environment.
Some common challenges include:
• When a network outage occurs, it can take a lot of time to find the root cause and fix it.
• The identification and grouping of applications and dependencies can be difficult.
• Planning for security accurately can be complex.
• The ability to gain a full sight network picture takes time and effort to keep up to date.
• Getting insight into third-party network appliances often comes with having disparate management utilities.
Intelligent Network Visibility is a well-architected validated solution that seeks to solve these challenges by providing detailed design, implementation, configuration, and operation guidance for VMware Cloud Foundation customers. This provides the ability to gain critical insights into their network and enhance troubleshooting efforts by implementing VMware Aria Operations for Networks into the VMware Cloud Foundation environment and configuring it, to pull from the various data sources in the environment.
Solution Overview
Intelligent Network Visibility for VMware Cloud Foundation is built using VMware best design practices and design principles as well as the implementation steps for VMware Aria Operations for Networks deployed within an VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle environment in VCF-aware mode and the integration of the two with VMware Cloud Foundation. This solution details the design decisions from how and where to deploy the VMware Aria Operations for Networks Platform and Collector nodes, as well as sizing and scaling considerations. Details about various VMware Cloud Foundation data sources and how they are integrated into the VMware Aria Operations for Networks platform are also covered within this solution. This provides a highly repeatable process that can be adapted into all of your VMware Cloud Foundation environments.
In the logical design below, the VMware Aria for Operations for Networks Platform is deployed to the management domain of the first VMware Cloud Foundation instance. In each VMware Cloud Foundation environment, a collector node gets installed and integrates with each of the data sources in the VMware Cloud Foundation environments and stores all of the flow data inside of the platform node. This allows an authorized user to connect to VMware Aria for Operations for Networks and gain visibility into their network and aid in many network tasks.
Ready to Start with Intelligent Network Visibility?
The Intelligent Network Visibility VMware Validated Solution is available now and you can access it by viewing its resource page here: Intelligent Network Visibility for VMware Cloud Foundation.
Summary
Intelligent Network Visibility is an enterprise-ready solution deployed on top of VMware Cloud Foundation and helps provide VCF customers with a quick and efficient way to gain insights into their network and be able to discover applications, assess and plan security and improve the troubleshooting of the network when the need arises.
Resources
Intelligent Network Visibility for VMware Cloud Foundation
What’s New for VMware Cloud Foundation offering VMware Aria Operations for Networks 6.12
