Because organizations change and grow by continually adding new applications for users, over time it is difficult for IT organizations to understand what is happening on the network infrastructure. vRealize Network Insight’s application discovery capability can understand which workloads, VMs, physical servers, and Kubernetes containers make up that application and then organize it across locations including public cloud. This information is then used to help customers enable security network segmentation policies or enable migrations. vRealize Network Insight will use machine learning to discover what VMs are part of an application. This application discovery capability dynamically learns and is an improvement over the previous manual discovery method. This will be a key advantage for customers who need to have visibility into their infrastructure.
Once all the application boundaries are discovered and mapped out, vRealize Network Insight can be used for planning application migrations to the public cloud, VMware Cloud, or migrations to even larger data centers using other solution integrations with VMware HCX.
Using Machine Learning, vRealize Network Insight 6.2 will offer Flow Based Application Discovery to all on-premises deployments of vRealize Network Insight. This functionality was initially introduced only on the vRealize Network Insight Cloud (SaaS) deployments since April 2020 but will be newly available for on-premises deployments so all vRealize Network Insight customers will benefit.
More innovations in the new release:
Assurance and Verification: This release will improve usability and scale improvements for business intent validation and enable a more proactive network.
VMware NSX-T: This release will improve metrics thresholds as well as search query and filtering capabilities for BGP and Equal-cost multi-path (ECMP). There will be network segmentation enhancements to offer more fine-grained rules for talking groups, protocols, and ports which will also be supported with .csv and XML export for planning in helping protect against potential security intrusions.
VMware SD-WAN: There will be improved visibility with application heat maps that help pinpoint critical issues for faster troubleshooting resolution.
VMware Cloud: There will be new network visibility for both Google Cloud VMware Engine and Azure VMware Solution so users will have more capabilities to correlate application performance across more multi-cloud environments.
VMware Cloud on AWS network visibility with vRealize Network Insight will include SDDC Groups and AWS Transit Connect traffic flows which will help with cost analysis to better measure and optimize network performance.
–Bandwidth Metrics for Cost Planning
vRealize Network Insight will have new network visibility for VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC Groups for traffic flows and bandwidth so a user can perform cost analysis with the information to measure and optimize network performance when planning data center extensions.
In this vRealize Network Insight release, SDDC Group flows will also be supported. Flow based application discovery will also be supported with SDDC Groups to discover VMs and application boundaries.
New detailed metrics will be also be available for VMware Cloud on AWS edge router and VMware HCX Network Extension (L2C) to measure bandwidth and packets per second.
–Transit Connect
The inventory dashboards will include VMware Cloud on AWS Transit Connect with metrics, flows, events for more detailed troubleshooting. There will also be new network visibility support for L3 MPLS VPN and VRF Route Leaking for VMware Cloud on AWS Direct Connect Colo Routers.
–Alerts and Thresholds
For VMware Cloud on AWS when certain metrics and thresholds are exceeded for network configuration environments, vRealize Network Insight Cloud will set alerts on various maximum threshold metrics for network and security configurations.
All new improvements in the release will offer users a more complete end-to-end view of their network infrastructure so they can visually see the connections as they further optimize their applications and quality of user experience. There is also a new vRealize Network Insight Search Exchange where a community of users share useful searches of various metrics on the infrastructure. For improved efficiency check out the new Automation script examples on the vRealize Network Insight Sample Exchange. If you are learning about vRealize Network Insight, explore deep dives and videos of vRealize Network Insight with Pathfinder.
Here are additional resources to explore:
-VMware Modern Network Solutions, Future of Networking webpage
-VMware vRealize Network Insight webpage
–Infographic: vRealize Network Insight Assurance and Verification
