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 enhances the visibility and analytics for NSX-T 3.1, VMware SD-WAN, VMware Cloud on AWS, and other aspects of the end-to-end infrastructure. The shift from version 5.x to 6.0 will be a fundamental improvement with the key new capability of vRealize Network Insight Assurance and Verification.
Networks and their interactions with applications and users are very complex. As our customers run their businesses, they will need to provision constant changes to the network to keep the business running. When network infrastructure changes occur, verifying that business intent rules will still be followed after those changes 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 intent is still being followed is a challenge due to the 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. Yes, there will need to be a new way to verify intent.
New! Network Assurance and Verification
The latest vRealize Network Insight 6.0 release will add 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 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 that case, vRealize Network Insight Assurance and Verification capabilities will alert the staff that this intent is failing so that corrective changes can occur.
Enhanced VMware SD-WAN Visibility
Additionally, in this release, there will be an emphasis to improve application and infrastructure performance with new VMware SD-WAN visibility capabilities from vRealize Network Insight that will 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, Edge-to-Gateway Tunnel connectivity graphs to enhance troubleshooting workflows. We will introduce an Internet Service Providers (ISP) dashboard to equip SD-WAN operators better to streamline troubleshooting workflows associated with performance degradation challenges faced by a growing list of work from home and distributed workforce users. Our new ISP dashboard will help identify ISP outages leading to performance impact for users in a particular branch or across locations by providing insights onto ISP links and performance metrics. Further, vRealize Network Insight combined with VMware Edge Network Intelligence deployments will enhance 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: Layer 2 Extension with HCX in VMware Cloud on AWS. vRealize Network Insight Cloud and vRealize Network Insight will 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 in VMware Cloud on AWS for users to 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 will allow Managed Service Providers to offer vRealize Network Insight Cloud capabilities to their customers and manage tenants on a multi-tenant dashboard. Read the blog for details.
• Importing Firewalls Rules into VMware Cloud on AWS to increase security with micro-segmentation will be easier using vRealize Network Insight Cloud and an available script on GitHub. Read the blog for details
• Faster migrations will be available by importing vRealize Network Insight applications into VMware HCX mobility groups. This new capability will accelerate application migrations by using an available script on GitHub. Read the blog for details.
vRealize Operations Integration Enhancements
There will be improvements to the integration with vRealize Operations 8.2 which will now include applications discovered in vRealize Network Insight sharing applications with 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 is adequate for this functionality to work. vRealize Operations 8.2 already will ship with this integration out of the box so no management pack will be required. The new integration will be the latest addition to the existing integration where alerts and events are shared.
Other New 6.0 Enhancements
vRealize Network Insight 6.0 will include new capabilities for backup and restore for easier redeployment in other locations as well as for recovery. For both vRealize Network Insight and vRealize Network Insight Cloud there will also be enhancements to metrics, search, and pinboards for better usability and collaboration between users of vRealize Network Insight.
vRealize Network Insight Cloud will now include 3-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 onto vRealize Network Insight Cloud. These enhancements will all 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 previously available vRealize Network Insight Cloud geo locations. The updated list of available geographic locations for vRealize Network Insight Cloud are: US West (Oregon), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney).
Summary
Running a large network is always a challenge especially compounded with 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 so managing the day to day is easier with more accuracy and will allow more time for strategic initiatives.
Learn more about the release by viewing the new video and eBooks at the updated webpage here
Experience the Hands-On Lab HOL-2102-91-ISM vRealize Network Insight for Network Assurance and Verification
If you are a Service Providers or MSP, look at the new Cloud Provider Hub webpage
Try a 30-day free trial of vRealize Network Insight Cloud 6.0.0
.
