It’s that time again as we are happy to announce that vRealize Network Insight 6.3 is now available! In this blog, I will provide an overview of some of the great new features added in the 6.3 release, which just make vRealize Network Insight even more powerful in managing and monitoring your network and security infrastructure!
VMware Cloud on Dell EMC Support
Let’s kick things off with VMware Cloud and the addition of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC support in vRealize Network Insight 6.3! The support for both public cloud and VMware continues to grow in this release.
As with other hyperscalers supported in vRealize Network Insight, you can now take advantage of all of the great features such as Application Discovery, Migration Planning, Security Planning, Alerts & Analytics, and detailed dashboards when it comes to your VMware Cloud on Dell EMC environment.
VMware SD-WAN Gateway Dashboard
One of the great new features added in vRealize Network Insight 6.3 is the VMware SD-WAN Gateway Dashboard which brings visibility into the performance and utilization of the gateways that are being utilized by the VMware SD-WAN Edges throughout your SD-WAN infrastructure. As you can see in Figure 1 below, we get a detailed dashboard for each VMware SD-WAN gateway. In the new gateway dashboard, you will find a topology overview showing the tunnels between each VMware SD-WAN Edge and the selected gateway, along with the ability to filter between healthy and unhealthy tunnels. As you hover over each tunnel or edge, you will see the Quality of Experience score for each making it simple to understand how each tunnel and edge is performing using the associated gateway. The new VMware SD-WAN Gateway dashboard is also packed full of other details such as a list of all of the edges that are utilizing the gateway, a list of all of the tunnels along with their performance metrics, and a flow visibility chart with various filters making it simple to focus on the flows of interest.
Customizable Polling Intervals
Have you ever had specific routers, switches, or firewalls in which you wanted to have the ability to configure how often configuration data is collected? In vRealize Network Insight 6.3, you now have the ability to choose how often configuration data is collected by vRNI, including the option to collect configuration data on demand!
Setting the configuration data collection interval can be configured under the settings option for each device, as seen in Figure 2 below. By default, vRealize Network Insight will collect configuration data from each router, switch, or firewall every 10 minutes. To change the collection polling interval, simply choose how often you would like vRealize Network Insight to collect configuration data.
You can even get more granular and specify the interval by minutes, hours, or days using the Custom Interval option, as seen in Figure 3 below.
If you want to have vRealize Network Insight collect the configuration data on-demand, you can find the option under the list of Accounts and Data Sources as seen in Figure 4 below.
Network Assurance and Verification
One of my favorite new features in vRealize Network Insight 6.3 falls under the Network Assurance and Verification Network Map feature. When working with any network map, especially in a large virtual or physical network infrastructure, I like to have the ability to utilize my monitor’s full screens real estate. In vRealize Network Insight 6.3, we now have the option to view and edit the Network Map in full-screen mode, making it easy to view your entire virtual and physical infrastructure! In Figure 5 below, you will see the option to toggle between standard view and full-screen view in the Network Map.
In Figure 6, you will see the difference that full-screen mode brings to the Network Map.
Some other great new features added in this release under Network Assurance and Verification include an addition to the Intent library for VRRP and HSRP check. This new intent will check your infrastructure for any configuration mismatches between active and standby routers along with operational errors, as seen in Figure 7 below.
NSX-T Manager Network Utilization and Top 25 VM’s
Like the awesome Network Utilization Dashboard found under the VMware Cloud SDDC dashboard in vRealize Network Insight, you will now find that the same dashboard has been added to the NSX-T Manager Dashboard vRealize Network Insight 6.3. The Network Utilization Dashboard provides detailed metrics that include Network Traffic Rate and Packets per Seconds for Tx and Rx displayed in various formats such as average and maximum and 95th percentile for each VM, as seen in Figure 8 below.
Also added to the NSX-T Manager Dashboard is a list of the Top 25 VM’s based on network traffic rate and packets per second, as seen in Figure 9 below.
Additional Nuggets
- VMware Cloud on AWS configuration maximum alerts and trends related to Network and Security
- Support for up to 15-node Platform XL Clusters
- 40 plus NSX-T events are optimized for near-real-time notification
- vSAN Datastore Metrics
Conclusion
As you can see, vRealize Network Insight 6.3 is bundled with many great new features as always. For a detailed list of all of the new enhancements and features, you can check out the vRealize Network Insight 6.3 release notes found here. You can take advantage of all these great new features today by upgrading to VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.3 or a trial VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud.
Feature Walkthrough
Experience these new features yourself by using the interactive feature walkthrough demo below.
