Today we are happy to announce that vRealize Network Insight 6.1 is available!! It is hard to believe that we are already at this time again as it seems like yesterday we were telling you about the incredible release of vRealize Network Insight 6.0. This blog will dive into some of the great new features and enhancements bundled into the vRNI 6.1 release.
Network Assurance and Verification
In the release of vRealize Network Insight 6.0, we introduced you to Network Assurance and Verification in vRealize Network Insight, a game-changer when modeling your virtual and physical network using formal verification methods. In vRealize Network Insight 6.1, we have added some new features and support for additional 3rd party devices.
Let’s start with the two new intents added in the Intents Dashboard: the Native VLAN Tagging Mismatch and the Native VLAN Mismatch intents for physical network devices. With the Native VLAN Tagging Mismatch Intent, you will be able to check for consistency between peer ports to ensure that Native VLAN Tagging of the peer ports match and that you don’t have ports configured where one port has Native VLAN Tagging enabled and its peer port has Native VLAN Tagging disabled. vRealize Network Insight will consistently check the network state and alert when a Native VLAN Tagging Mismatch is detected, as seen in figure 1 below.
You can also run a search query to determine how many and which ports have Native VLAN Tagging enabled or disabled in your network infrastructure, as seen in figure 2 below.
With the Native VLAN Mismatch Intent, vRealize Network Insight will check to ensure that ports configured with a Native VLAN match consistently and will provide an alert if a mismatch is detected, as seen in figure 3 below.
One of my favorite new features added to Network Assurance and Verification in vRealize Network Insight 6.1 is the ability to view the device configuration data used when conducting a path search in the Network Map. With this new feature, you can view the data collected and used by vRealize Network Insight when analyzing paths between virtual and physical networking devices, which is decisive for troubleshooting issues in your network infrastructure. In figures 4 & 5 below, I have run a path search between two virtual machines deployed in our infrastructure and have explicitly focused on the ethernet port’s data display traversed in this path.
Figure 5 above shows the specified Packet Header’s data and the command used to collect the data for this specific interface. If vRealize Network Insight used more than one command to gather data, you could toggle between each command output collected by vRealize Network Insight.
Additional new features you will find regarding Assurance and Verification are the added support for both Juniper Netconf and SSH data collection and modeling support for Palo Alto Firewalls in the Network Map.
VMware SD-WAN Analytics
Let’s now look at what we have added regarding additional SD-WAN Analytics for SD-WAN Edge Uplink Utilization and SD-WAN Link Metering. In vRealize Network Insight 6.1, you can now specify Intents for SD-WAN Edge Uplink Utilization to better monitor your uplinks using predefined scopes based on your business needs. As seen in figure 6 below, you have the option to define Intents based on Utilization and Average Throughput for your various uplinks.
After choosing a scope, you can define the condition, severity, and how you prefer to be alerted if the condition is triggered, along with defining exceptions if needed, as seen in figure 7 below.
After you have defined your SD-WAN Edge Uplink Utilization Intent, you can view the expressed Intent’s state located in the Intent Dashboard, as seen in figure 8 below. As we can see, the Intent is currently in a Fail State.
By clicking on the Intent, we can view detailed analytics along with the impacted uplinks that have exceeded our predefined Intent for SD-WAN Edge Uplink Utilization, as seen in figure 9 below.
In a similar fashion to defining an SD-WAN Edge Uplink Utilization Intent, we can now define a scope for link metering and a billing cycle, as seen in figure 10 below.
When the defined condition triggers, vRealize Network Insight will generate an alert and provide you with the detailed analytics and impacted entities, as seen in figure 11 below.
We can also see our defined intents’ status in the VMware SD-WAN Enterprise Summary Dashboard, as seen in figure 12 below.
So as you can see, vRealize Network Insight for VMware SD-WAN continues to deliver features that enhance your visibility and monitoring capabilities of your VMware SD-WAN Infrastructure!
NSX Intelligence Integration
vRealize Network Insight and VMware NSX have always complemented each other like bread and butter! It now gets even better with the integration of vRealize Network Insight and NSX Intelligence. In vRealize Network Insight 6.1, you will find that integration with NSX Intelligence is as simple as a single click! NSX intelligence uses DPI to gain Layer 7 flow visibility and can now enhance flow visibility in vRealize Network Insight by providing the Layer 7 Application ID for Flows.
As seen below in figure 13, this integration provides Layer 7 Application IDs to vRealize Network Insight to enrich flow records.
When integration with NSX Intelligence is enabled, the flow record in vRealize Network Insight will now also display the Layer 7 service, as seen in figure 14 below,
Layer 7 visibility enhances vRealize Network Insights flow visibility and allows for even better micro-segmentation planning.
As you can see, vRealize Network Insight 6.1 is bundled with a bunch of awesome new features as always with each quarterly release of vRealize Network Insight. vRealize Network Insight 6.1 also contains many usability enhancements that include new metrics charts for VMware NSX and 3rd Party devices. You will also find new enhancements for VMC on AWS regarding T0 Gateway dashboards and metrics. For a detailed list of all of the new enhancements and features, you can check out the vRealize Network Insight 6.1 release notes found here.
These impressive new features found in vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and vRealize Network Insight Cloud will give users better end-to-end visibility. With the improved analytics and visibility, users now are enabled to better scale to their business needs. With all of these new features in vRealize Network Insight 6.1, it will improve recommendations to optimize and make a great impact for VMware vRealize Network Insight users. You can take advantage of all these great new features today by upgrading to VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.1 or a trial VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud.
