Today, I’m excited to announce the general availability of vRealize Network Insight 5.3 and the same features in vRealize Network Insight Cloud! In this blog post, I’ll take you through the most exciting new features and changes.
VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud
It’s no secret that we’ve been going full out on SD-WAN, and that vRealize Network Insight has been an excellent operational companion for VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud, and with version 5.3; it gets better!
More Traffic Flow Visibility
To get a better grasp on the network traffic that flows through the SD-WAN, a new flow visibility chart per SD-WAN Edge has been introduced. The below chart quickly visualizes the types of traffic the edge is sending:
This chart shows all network flows originating from the edge. Then, it divides this into the flows through the SD-WAN, flows that go directly to the internet (local break-out), flows that traverse a cloud gateway (SaaS optimized), and edge to edge traffic.
You can also filter on Client IPs to see what paths the traffic of a specified client takes, filter on the Flow Path, the Application, and even the Destination Edge.
End-to-End Paths – Flow- & Configuration-based
One of the great things about vRealize Network Insight is that it has full visibility on the network topology. You’re able to bring up network topologies between two endpoints: a client IP to a VM, VM to VM, etc. These topologies are maintained based on the network configuration that is in place. With 5.3, there’s a new option to show these paths based on the specific network flow that you’re troubleshooting.
NSX-T Latency
There have been several enhancements revolving around latency metrics with NSX-T. There have been measurements for very specific types of latencies (vNIC to vNIC, pNIC to vNIC, VTEP to VTEP) in vRealize Network Insight already, and this release adds support for NSX-T 3.0 and the NSX-T running inside VMware Cloud on AWS. Support for TCP Retransmission counts has also been added. With retransmissions, it’s easier to see which applications are experiencing a high ‘resend’ problem, where the first delivery for TCP traffic doesn’t work.
Click the below screenshots to enlarge.
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On the left, you see the TCP retransmissions on a per-flow basis. These metrics get reported by NSX-T when you enabled IPFIX on the NSX-T data source. On the right, you can see the TCP round-trip-time (RTT) on flows that originate from the NSX-T Manager inside VMware Cloud on AWS.
Broader Ecosystem
With vRealize Network Insight 5.3, the vendor ecosystem also grows. We’ve added support for the HP Enterprise FlexFabric 5940 and the FlexNetwork 10500 device series. Mellanox Switches from the SN2100 and SN2410 device series are also added to the supported data sources. Welcome to the family!
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Others
The above highlights are just that; highlights. There’s a lot more going on in this release, of which I’d like to highlight just a few briefly:
- Important log messages from Arista devices are correlated to the device (Port down, Fan & PSU problems, etc.).
- There’s a new per-tunnel Quality of Experience metric for SD-WAN Edges.
- VMware Cloud on AWS Direct Connects are now directly available on the SDDC Dashboard.
- The Security Planner has been optimized for large environments and prevents information overload.
- The Collector appliance can now handle up to 35.000 VMs on a single vCenter.
Conclusion
vRealize Network Insight 5.3 builds upon the great foundation it already has, improving the networking & security troubleshooting and monitoring capabilities. Above are the main highlights, but there’s a ton more! You can find the full release notes here.
Upgrades to 5.3 are possible from 5.1 and above. Get the upgrade bundle here. If you’re a vRealize Network Insight Cloud customer, enjoy the new features; you are already on the new version!
