Micro Focus Network Virtualization [EOL] Reviews

The most valuable features are flexibility and scalability.

It allows us to update our infrastructure. We're moving out of a period of lack of investment into a period of investment, so it is allowing us to bring everything up-to-date; it essentially gives us the tools to do that.

I can’t specifically think of any needed improvements at the moment.

Stability is fine, as far as I can tell.

We haven’t had experience with scale yet. We're looking to scale out over the next year or so.

Technical support is generally excellent.

We realized that our technology was essentially out of date and that we needed to move towards a virtual environment. So we needed to invest in that. We moved away from physical hardware, which is very 2005, to a newer environment.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I inherited it. I'm still working for the organization, so as far as I can tell, it was fairly straightforward. We worked with HPE partners to make sure that was straightforward and smooth.

We looked over other bits and pieces, but I can’t name them specifically. We ended up choosing HPE because we've used them for a number of other things as well and it's always been a good brand for us, so it's a worthwhile product.

In terms of consistency of delivery, this solution gives us room to grow as well. We're not trapped in a corner in terms of what we need to do in the next year or two. So that's really important for us as well.

They'll be restricted by their legal requirements in terms of what they can actually do in order to source, but I would strongly recommend they talk to a variety of partners to find a decent partner that they trust and will get good customer service from. Get advice, and kind of go from there. Which I think is one of the reasons why the HPE partner program is so important because it gets that message across and gets the quality of the product across.

Network virtualization can help us to create a new type of network. You can do something really different. You can create public clouds for your private applications from your data centers. You can offer something really new, customized, and more what the network team wants.

This solution allows us to offer a solution for the application, including all the things they need. This is a complete package, including the network with the sub-netting and the security with micro-segmentation with load balancing. A long time ago, you needed a few weeks to provide this kind of architecture. Now you can offer this in few minutes. It is very fast.

One of the really good options of the SDN on DCN is the micro-segmentation. I would like to see it act more like a real firewall. You can use micro-segmentation, but you still need little VM firewalls to do complex filtering. If you could do this on DCN, it would really be perfect.

You want to be able to do this in network virtualization. I know it's still a new product, but I would like to see more solutions in it, such as micro-segmentation.

For now, we are just trying it in tests. We plan to put it into production and in data centers in the next two months.

It scales to big data centers, to a few thousand servers/boxes.

We used technical support from HPE France. They came to our company, to our data center, and helped us to run the installation and to make the test plan.

Previous to this solution, we had a traditional network architecture. I saw the HPE DCN when I was at the ETSS in Dublin. I saw that product, I wanted to try it, and I asked for a test lab in our data center. I wanted to try network virtualization.

I was involved in the installation. It was easy to install, but we had the help of HPE to install it. This solution is something really new. When you do network and security, it's something like old school network. SDN is something really new for us, so it's completely different.

It's a new way of syncing the network so we really need help for this. It's not hard to learn, but you have to have another state of mind to do it. The way of syncing the network is different. You have the underlay and the overlay and you have to know that it's completely different from traditional networks. It's something really new, so you need a little bit of time to understand the differences.

We compared this tool to Cisco ACI and VMware NSX.

We chose this tool because it is the most complete solution. It's more compliant with our actual applications, data centers, and bare metal servers.

I would recommend this solution to a colleague.

Depicting the real user experience using an emulation rather than a simulation, that's one of the key points. The second is, we were able to reduce a lot of hardware calls where we used to have load generators across the globe.

We are able to use real-world scenarios from the global libraries with Network Virtualization pool support. It goes through about 1.3 billion libraries on any scenario, any bandwidth, and any network condition you could think of. It also supports the mobile aspect of it. It can be any carrier across the globe, be it on a host providing LTE bandwidth or a 3G bandwidth or a 2G bandwidth. It gives that kind of visibility to the business as well as the application IP teams. Telling them, "Hey, this is how your application is going to work on XYZ bandwidth parameters on XYZ carrier based on whatever parameters that we set." It kind of helps us.

They need to go beyond what they are doing right now and look at streaming capabilities because a lot of news organizations, a lot of media and entertainment companies, need a lot of streaming support. Network Virtualization needs to work across multiple streams. One of the good features about Network Virtualization is they have analytic support, which gives a web page performance. There they need to align themselves to the latest JavaScript technologies so that it's a better way of reporting what the user is seeing on his desktop, browser, or whatever device being used.

The product is very stable. HP procured Shunra about a couple of years back, and since then it's been an evolution on the tool set. They still need to grow a lot for a lot more protocols, but it's stable.

It's highly scalable.

I've not had to contact tech support.

Network Virtualization is required for pretty much any organization. We had been using Network Virtualization even before it became Network Virtualization. We had been using Shunra.

It's pretty straightforward as long as you know how the tool is designed to work and the architecture behind how you need to implement it for your environment.

If it were up to me to buy a new tool, I want to make sure it meets my requirement. It needs to support the requirement. That's the kind of thought process that I would go thru for anybody who is trying to choose a tool. Are you globally placed? Are you more into mobility? Are you more into a thick-line application, where there is not going to be any mobility? You might not need it. You can still see how your product is going to work across multiple bandwidth parameters or whatever. It's a very useful tool, but it all depends on how people want to utilize that tool. The proper gauging exercise needs to go on.

It gives us the ability to not have to test through the product network. This gets rid of the risk of blocking the network for other applications that actually need to use it. It's always risky when running tests on the product network.

Also, we get a lot of requests for load performance testing for locations outside of our German headquarters. Network Virtualization allows us to test virtually instead of placing load generators somewhere else in the world.

The reporting could be a little bit better. There are other issues that I can't recall.

We've only used it for a POC.

It's been stable during our POC.

We have many other HP solutions that scale well. This solution does, too.

Overall, we're quite satisfied with technical support.

HP assisted us with the initial setup of our POC, which was OK. We felt that a few things could have been done easier and we had a few problems along the way, but in the end everything worked out well.