In this technical overview blog, I will cover some of the new features packed into the latest release of vRealize Network Insight that will enhance your visibility into your virtual and physical multi-cloud infrastructure. If you missed our announcement blog for vRealize Network Insight 6.7, make sure to check it out!
IPv6 Support
Let’s start things off by taking a look at the additional support added for IPv6 when it comes to vRealize Network Insight deployment, Flow Visibility, and VM to VM Paths. When deploying vRealize Network Insight 6.7, you now have the option to deploy the Platform and Collector virtual appliances using IPv4, IPv6, and IPv6 Dual-Stack. These are all supported in a single node or cluster node deployment. Figures 1 & 2 below, show an example of deploying vRealize Network Insight using IPv6 and IPv6 Dual-Stack.
You can also use IPv6 addresses when adding data sources, configuring Identity and Access Management, and Alerts and Notifications (SMTP and SNMP Trap Destination).
When viewing various entities in vRealize Network Insight 6.7, or searching for data using the elastic search engine you can now view or query via IPv6 addresses. In Figure 3 below, you will see an example of viewing the network addresses for a specific host.
We can also now view IPv6 addresses when looking at various details such as Interfaces, BGP Neighbors, and much more in this example shown in figure 4 below of an NSX-T Router.
If you have already upgraded to vRealize Network Insight 6.7, you can use these various queries below in Figure 5 to start viewing IPv6 support in your multi-cloud infrastructure.
Last but not least, when it comes to IPv6 Support in vRealize Network Insight, we have also added support to view VM to VM paths using IPv6 Addresses, as seen in figure 6 below.
As you can see, the enhanced support for IPv6 visibility in vRealize Network Insight 6.7 encompasses a wealth of information, especially if you are running IPv6 within your infrastructure. You can also use IPv6 to create and discover applications withing the Application Dashboard in vRealize Network Insight.
HCX Networking Support in vRealize Network Insight 6.7
While vRealize Network Insight has supported integration with VMware HCX for some time now, we have introduced new features around HCX visibility in vRealize Network Insight Cloud 6.7.0 that I will dive into in this section of the technical overview.
First up, you will notice a new HCX Manager Dashboard that gives you an excellent overview and summary of each HCX deployment. This centralized view helps you keep an eye on how your HCX infrastructure and appliances are performing, which is great when you are performing application migrations. In Figure 7 below, you will notice that the new dashboard provides you with an overall summary and typologies of the interconnect and the network extension.
What I like about the new HCX Dashboard is that you can quickly access and view any alerts, flows, and detailed metrics, including Appliance VM and Host metrics, Tunnel metrics, and Appliance VM Network Utilization metrics, using the links found at the top of the new dashboard. When viewing these metrics in vRealize Network Insight Cloud, you will notice that you can also set threshold alerts for both the HCX Appliances and HCX Tunnels as part of the new supported alerts added in this release.
When viewing flows within the HCX Dashboard, you will also find detailed flows for the HCX Manager, Service Mesh, and Layer 2 Extensions that provide visibility into the overall performance of your HCX deployments, as seen below.
Last but not least, regarding additional support for VMware HCX, we have added Guided Network Troubleshooting support to assist you in troubleshooting issues within your HCX infrastructure quickly, as seen in Figure 14 below.
Additional New Features
Some other key new features that I want to call out that are included in vRealize Network Insight 6.7 are as follows:
- Support for Cisco ACI Contracts in the Network Map Path Mapping
- Dropped flow alerts for Palo Alto Networks Firewalls and Checkpoint Firewalls
- vRNI In Product Learning to help guide you through various use cases in your environment
- vRNI Federation UI/UX enhancements
As you can see, this release is packed full of new features to enhance visibility and troubleshooting of your multi-cloud infrastructure both in the overlay and underlay. If you want to read more about some of the new features included, check out the vRealize Network Insight 6.7 Release Notes or reach out to your VMware account team and request a live demo! To learn more about vRealize Network Insight, make sure to visit the product webpage, where you can request a free trial of vRealize Network Insight 6.7
