One of the exciting areas of virtualization that has changed the landscape of how workloads are connected and the requirements for networking these workloads together is network virtualization. Network virtualization has allowed the network to be abstracted from the physical network so that regardless of the physical network equipment that is servicing network communication, organizations can have a secure, modern, feature-rich network platform, despite the lack of capabilities or design at the physical layer. This allows networks to be a software-defined construct, rather than a physical one.
Due to this shift, network virtualization has totally changed the paradigm of how networks can be provisioned and configured so that teams can provision virtualized workloads with agility and also ensure security is a top priority in the environment by implementing micro-segmentation. However, after network virtualization is introduced into the environment, there can be challenges with monitoring and understanding traffic flows that come into play due to the nature of the network layer being abstracted from the physical network.
How can organizations successfully monitor and understand the network flows with the network virtualization layer?
VMware has a product called vRealize Network Insight that helps organizations have proper visibility into the software-defined networking layer and understand the software-defined networking layer intelligently and insightfully. Recently, VMware introduced vRealize Network Insight 4.0 with new features that build upon its capabilities.
Let’s take a look at vRealize Network Insight 4.0 What’s New to take a closer look at these new features.
What is VMware vRealize Network Insight?
As mentioned, there are numerous benefits to the use of software-defined networking in the environment. As virtualization for compute, memory, and storage have done, network virtualization has abstracted the networking layer from the physical hardware. This provides tremendous benefits when it comes to provisioning and managing networks at scale as software, rather than hardware. Additionally, it provides tremendous security benefits with a “zero-trust” model of security that is instantiated with micro-segmentation.
However, it can become difficult for customers who are either wanting to implement methodologies such as micro-segmentation or who have already implemented these by way of NSX to understand their traffic flows and how endpoints are talking to both virtualized and physical workloads. The traditional tools that are only aware of the physical layer are no longer effective in having this kind of visibility into the software-defined networking layer.
This is where vRealize Network Insight comes into play. VMware’s vRealize Network Insight or vRNI is purpose-built for software-defined networking so that customers can understand the traffic flows during the design phase before implementing micro-segmentation with NSX or after implementing NSX. This is crucial for many areas of “day-2” operations and beyond when thinking about application performance tuning, troubleshooting, and multi-cloud networking design.
VMware’s vRealize Network Insight allows customers to have the visibility needed across both the physical and the virtual network layers to have the tools needed to both monitor and troubleshoot performance, security, and understand traffic flows for virtual and physical resources. This intelligent look across both the physical and virtual network landscape to bring visibility to both aspects of the network provides tremendous business value to the customer. Additionally, as we will see, the new version of vRealize Network Insight provides this same type of visibility to discover how traffic is flowing to and from the cloud as well.
These types of capabilities, monitoring, and management are far beyond the traditional SNMP tools that we have used for decades that allow having visibility into the network by polling physical devices.
Let’s now take a look at VMware vRealize Network Insight What’s New to see the new features that are included in this release of the software including new support from a cloud network perspective.
VMware vRealize Network Insight 4.0 What’s New
At a high level, there are many new supported capabilities and features with vRealize Network Insight 4.0. Starting with this release of vRealize Network Insight, there is new support for VMware Cloud on AWS as more organizations are leveraging this new offering from VMware. More and more businesses are building out hybrid network infrastructure with workloads running both on-premises as well as in the cloud. This means that paths can now be traced between virtual machines running on-premises, VMware Cloud on AWS, or with EC2 instances running in AWS. Additionally, new technologies and hardware devices are supported including Cisco ASA, Cisco ACI, as well as BGP-EVPN. New NSX day-2 events information, sFlow support, and F5 router visibility have been included in this version. Also, NSX-T support has been greatly improved in this release as well as it is gaining traction.
Of course, perhaps the biggest news with regards to the new features and capabilities is the support for VMware Cloud on AWS. With more and more environments bringing in a hybrid network element and including environments such as VMware Cloud on AWS, businesses need to extend the visibility and managed capabilities for the software-defined network past the boundaries of the on-premises environment and into the cloud. The new version of vRealize Network Insight makes this possible. Businesses can now view configurations, network statistics, and other information between NSX and vCenter as well as IPFIX flows between VMware Cloud on AWS VMs and then the flows back to the on-premises environment to NSX and vCenter. This allows having a full-circle view of the environment to have the entire picture of all aspects of the hybrid environment which is crucial for troubleshooting and provisioning.
Often, organizations have a handle on what happens inside the on-premises environment from a performance and troubleshooting perspective, however, once it leaves on-premises and traverses to the cloud, that visibility is lost. VMware vRealize Network Insight allows having that visibility of your hybrid application or cloud-native application to allow determining if there is a performance issue, which nodes the application is talking with, where there may be latency issues, etc.
The vRealize Network Insight dashboard provides tremendous visibility into the traffic flows, paths, firewall rules, any configuration issues or errors, and the network data paths along the way. Items can easily be clicked on to see even more detail on the configuration, rules, routers, paths, etc. These types of visibility improvements also help organizations to have great insight into the security posture they currently have throughout the environment. With this release of vRealize Network Insight, VMware has brought the same level of security visibility to the Cisco ASA as they have had with the Palo Alto and Checkpoint security devices.
Other points to mention about this release include NSX-T support. As mentioned, NSX-T support is improved in this release of vRealize Network Insight. There are greatly improved health-related events and metrics, visibility into connectivity issues, NSX API calls, statistics for NSX-T logical switches, logical ports, router interfaces, firewall rules. NAT support has been added with the additional capability to view SNAT, DNAT, and stateless rules. With NSX-T gaining in installation base and with VMware Cloud on AWS making use of NSX-T, vRealize Network Insight 4.0 has greatly expanded visibility into this variant of NSX.
Concluding Thoughts
Having the ability to utilize network virtualization is only part of the puzzle. Having the proper tools to gain visibility into, troubleshoot, see network flows, and endpoints are the other part of the equation. Especially since organizations are increasingly moving resources to the cloud in forms such as VMware Cloud on AWS, businesses need to be able to have the full range of visibility from both on-premises to the cloud and back.
VMware vRealize Network Insight 4.0 has greatly expanded on the capabilities included in the product to include VMware Cloud on AWS support, better NSX-T support, as well as more integration with vendors such as Cisco with ACI metrics, etc. By making use of these kinds of tools and understanding the traffic flows between on-premises and to the cloud and then back, organizations will have the ability to properly troubleshoot and understand bottlenecks in application performance. This is especially the case with hybrid applications or cloud applications that may have dependencies back to on-premises resources.
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