The latest versions of VMware vRealize Network Insight and vRealize Network Insight Cloud are here. Learn how the new capabilities improve visibility and analytics.
Today, VMware is announcing another exciting new release for VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.0 (on-premises) and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud 6.0.0 (SaaS) for the Virtual Cloud Network. This release includes new vRealize Network Insight Assurance and Verification capabilities that enhance visibility and analytics for NSX-T 3.1, VMware SD-WAN, VMware Cloud on AWS and other aspects of the end-to-end infrastructure. Networks and their interactions with applications and users are very complex. Our customers need to provision constant changes to the network to keep their businesses running. When network infrastructure changes occur, verifying that the business intent rules will continue being followed is a challenge.
An example of a business intent rule is never allowing reachability from the external web servers to the finance segment. A company can have hundreds of these business intent rules that span segmentation, reachability, compliance, resilience and other network best practices. Verifying that the intent is still being followed presents layers of complexity between interleaving virtual infrastructure, physical infrastructure, underlay and overlay technologies, connections to the public cloud, and the numerous network requirements the hundreds of applications typical companies deploy. So businesses need a new way to verify intent.
New Network Assurance and Verification
The latest vRealize Network Insight 6.0 release adds new Network Assurance and Verification capabilities to determine whether the network is meeting its intended goals. vRealize Network Insight will accomplish formal verification by using a unified mathematical model of how the network functions. This enables better network planning and path troubleshooting, which will result in the assurance of better uptime and network resiliency. These new capabilities will search paths and entities with a visual topology, help determine root cause and verify intent – all with the purpose of determining network innocence or guilt as soon as possible.
Figure 1. vRealize Network Insight Assurance and Verification will continually verify that the user-defined business policy and intent will be followed to improve security and reliability. In this segmentation example, connectivity between an internet web application and a financial database is not permitted by user-defined policy and intent rules. Suppose a future network change occurs, which inadvertently violates that policy. In such a case, vRealize Network Insight Assurance and Verification capabilities will alert staff that this intent is failing so corrective changes can occur.
Enhanced VMware SD-WAN visibility
Additionally, in this release, there’s an emphasis on improving application and infrastructure performance with new VMware SD-WAN visibility capabilities from vRealize Network Insight. These include VMware SD-WAN path tunnel visibility and round-trip time latency for richer flow visibility. The updated Edge Dashboard will now include Edge-to-Edge, Edge-to-Hub and Edge-to-Gateway Tunnel connectivity graphs to enhance troubleshooting workflows. We’re introducing an Internet Service Providers (ISP) dashboard to better equip SD-WAN operators to streamline troubleshooting workflows associated with performance degradation challenges faced by the growing number of work from home and distributed workforce users. The new ISP dashboard will help identify ISP outages impacting performance for users in a particular branch or across locations by providing insights into ISP links and performance metrics. Further, vRealize Network Insight combined with VMware Edge Network Intelligence deployments enhances visibility for VMware SD-WAN deployments with the Virtual Cloud Network.
Cloud enhancements
vRealize Network Insight 6.0 and vRealize Network Insight Cloud 6.0.0 enhancements for VMware Cloud on AWS include:
- Hybrid connectivity with HCX’s Layer 2 extension capabilities – vRealize Network Insight Cloud and vRealize Network Insight provide stitched flow visibility over HCX stretched Layer 2 VLAN connections between VMware Cloud SDDCs. This new capability enables customers to monitor migrations with VMware HCX and prevent network performance issues.
- Better application performance troubleshooting with Flow Round Trip Time (RTT) and Receive and Transmit metrics – Easily see abnormal and normal flow categories in the vRealize Network Insight dashboards.
- Multi-tenant capabilities with vRealize Network Insight Cloud on VMware Cloud Provider Hub – Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can offer vRealize Network Insight Cloud capabilities to their customers and manage tenants on a multi-tenant dashboard. Read the blog for more details.
- The ability to import Firewall Rules – Increasing security with micro-segmentation is easier using vRealize Network Insight Cloud and an available script on GitHub. Read the blog for additional details.
- Faster migrations by importing vRealize Network Insight applications into VMware HCX mobility groups – You can accelerate application migrations by using an available script on GitHub. Read the blog for further details.
vRealize Operations integration enhancements
There are also improvements to integrations with vRealize Operations 8.2. Applications discovered in vRealize Network Insight are now visible in vRealize Operations. This will allow vRealize Operations to merge this new information with other existing application data for better application correlation. vRealize Network Insight screens will launch in context for vRealize Operations users. Member user credentials are adequate for this functionality to work. vRealize Operations 8.2 will already ship with this integration out of the box so no management pack is required. This is the latest addition to the existing integration where alerts and events are shared.
Other new 6.0 capabilities
vRealize Network Insight 6.0 and vRealize Network Insight Cloud 6.0.0 include new capabilities for backup and restore for easier redeployment in other locations and recovery. There are also enhancements to metrics, search and pinboards for better usability and collaboration between users of vRealize Network Insight.
vRealize Network Insight Cloud will now include three-digit numbering (e.g. 6.0.0, 6.0.1, 6.0.2… 6.1.0, 6.1.2) to better reflect the more frequent cadence of enhancements enabled on vRealize Network Insight Cloud. All of these enhancements will make it to vRealize Network Insight on-premises, but at the current regular release interval. vRealize Network Insight Cloud is now available in Sydney, Australia in addition to existing geo-locations. The updated list of available locations for vRealize Network Insight Cloud includes US West (Oregon), Europe (London) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo and Sydney).
Summary
Running a large network is always a challenge, especially compounded by the numerous application and user requirements. With the latest 6.0 release, VMware vRealize Network Insight will continue to deliver end-to-end network, application and security visibility converged across virtual and physical networks. vRealize Network Insight will continue to improve the integrations with VMware NSX, VMware SD-WAN, VMware Cloud on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Kubernetes environments. The new vRealize Network Insight 6.0 release will help enable a transition from a reactive to a proactive understanding of the end-to-end network. Managing the network day-to-day is easier with greater visibility and accuracy, allowing more time for strategic initiatives.
Learn more about the latest VMware vRealize Network Insight release in the new video and eBooks here.
You can also explore vRealize Network Insight for Network Assurance and Verification capabilities in a Hands-On Lab.
If you’re a service provider or MSP, also check out the new Cloud Provider Hub webpage.
Ready to take the next step? Sign up for a 30-day free trial of vRealize Network Insight Cloud 6.0.0.
