VMware NSX Reviews

I was an intern at a relatively large company here in Morocco, and NSX is a great solution.

NSX has improved our organisation in many ways, by securing it with micro-segmentation, and by allowing us to implement logical equipment in a matter of seconds instead of waiting for the physical material to implement and configure.

The Distributed Firewall is simple to add to the network and rules are easy to implement on it.

It should be more adapted to the physical side of network topology in order to prevent unavailability.

To be able to do the DR and SRM migrations from datacenter to datacenter, we're able to do them with SRM with VXLAN, with the NSX product.

Just being more knowledgeable about the different functions. I think the product is fine. It's just learning more about the product, and how you can benefit from it, and what it's got to offer.

Very stable. We've had great success with it. It's a different mindset for the actual network folks that are used to building an old traditional way, but it's much faster to get things deployed with firewall rules.

It's definitely scalable, however large, however small. We can bring people in with VDI desktops, with a control set already around that, to be able to control what they get without having to create a new VM and recreate all the policies. It's already done upfront.

It's great, if we have any problems at all, we give them a call. If there's something that's new that we're trying to figure out, they're real good about helping us out.

At first, it was a little complex, but it's more internal, just learning a new product and what it can do for you. But once you get all that set up, and done with the collaboration, and the other groups, it's really not that bad.

In terms of selecting a vendor, our end goal is to be able to accomplish a certain function that we need to for the business. But also, if we have any trouble, to be able to call and get some support, and work through those issues without, "You bought the product now, so you're on your own." They've been real good about support.

It's changed the way we do things. It's made things a lot more easy. Once everything's set up, and you have the collaboration from all the other different groups, it just works. It's going to help me be able to do a lot of the DR stuff that I'm working on with VXLAN, working through NSX and all those rule sets.

We can deliver the network that customers need quickly and safely. That is most important.

There is one feature I'm finding with VMware which is special for us from IBM with JIRA routing protocols. This is in the future that they are planning, especially right now with our compatible AWS. AWS is good, understood, except for the software to improve, probably with Amazon right now doing this partnership. VMware and access are going to be improved for that.

It's totally stable, because right now it's running version 6.3. It's very mature. Even the versions with VMware 5.5, 6, and 6.5 are very stable right now. It's becoming more open to other environments, too. It's not only working with VMware, but also with Red Hat and Ubuntu. It's an amazing product.

Totally scalable. I almost can tell this is the first real multi-tenant product from VMware that will scale out and do real multitenancy.

Tech support is nice. It could be a little bit better. Simple, since this is a new product, you don't have too much specialists over the world. Because it is a mix between the virtual world with VMs, and now networks, it's networking virtualization. So, VMware with NSX is being a pioneer. They are improving their support every day.

NSX gives us the ability to put our network, NSX, onto any network there is, which allows us not to have to go to the network team to create networks our VLANs for networks. We can just create all our networks right from the start. Whenever we want to spin something up, we just spin it up.

So far, what I've seen here at VMworld, it seems to be improving just the same line as everything else. It's going to expand, grow and grow and grow. It's going everywhere. It's not just going into "I'm using the V version of NSX," but it's going out to every environment. It's going out to all the clouds so that even if you have the V, you can also use the cloud part and put it into there, so it seems to be growing where it needs to go.

It still needs to grow. There are still some features that it doesn't do, like it doesn't do multicasting. It does do some multicasting, but it's within their own infrastructure, but multicasting in general, it doesn't do.

So far, it's been very stable. I've used it since the very beginning and it's been very stable in the beginning, and as they've added more and more features, it's become more and more stable in the environment; that is, better in the environment because we're able to use more and more features within it.

So far it's been very scalable, and with the new versions that are coming out, it's even more and more scalable. They've added more and more features of routing that they didn't have in the first versions, which allow it to be more scalable. It's become better than the actual infrastructure, the original network infrastructure that's there, because we can lay it on anything and it will scale to any part of the network that we want.

So far, I've had very good tech support. A lot of the guys we talk to are very knowledgeable, and if they don't know it, they're able to talk to others within their group that will know it. So I've gotten very good results from them.

The installation is very straightforward. The part that gets complex is how you do your routing, how you do your ESGs, how you set up the actual network itself within it. But once it's set up, you just create virtual switches and put any network you want on it. It becomes almost seamless.

In terms of criteria for selecting a vendor, it's a little of everything. It's the reputation that they have, but it's also more of the tech support, as well as the documentation that they have, because not everybody in their environment, as well as your own environment, knows everything. So you have to be able to look up stuff and have that knowledge to be able to do it, as well as allow them to do it.

They have a lot of good KB articles on what's going on, so if you need a problem solved, you look at that first and you'll be able to find it pretty easily.

I sell to a lot of customers in the DoD. NSX has really become part of their ecosystem, especially for the tactical customers in the DoD. It's very important for them to have small footprints and have as much services in their servers, as possible. NSX has fit this role really well for them.

• Going through and getting more features sets from the routing protocols is definitely necessary for the future.
• Being able to properly manipulate BGP
• Getting multiprotocol BGP into the stack
• A little bit better redistribution

As a CCIE, I like to have all my tool sets, and there are some things which NSX is missing right now.

It's missing some more advanced features. As an engineer, we need those tools. We need to be able to manipulate routes. We need to be able to set traffic the way that we need it to be. Especially as we interact with other vendors, sometimes it makes it difficult to have to do some workarounds. Once VMware flushes out the RFC for things like BGP and OSPF, it will be better.

We've tested it in our labs, and our customers are running it now. It is definitely stable, and it does what it's supposed to with no unnecessary crashes.

It's one of the major benefits of it. The distributed nature of NSX is really what the customers are interested in: spread into workloads across a lot of servers and not working out one host too hard.

All my customers seem to be very happy with the technical support. Anytime they call up, everything is very responsive and the engineers are intelligent. They know how to help them solve their problems.

NSX is one of the simplest network solutions that I've ever worked with.

I did a demo for our company's engineers about a year ago, and in 45 minutes, I stood up a cluster and had the VXLAN and some of the firewall policies, up and running in a 45-minute demo. It's really easy to use and everybody walked away from it knowing how to use NSX just from a 45-minute presentation.

It's very important for us to have good relationships with VMware from a reseller standpoint, and especially in the DoD, we have great reps. VMware is probably a 90% of the DoD networks. It's definitely not just reputation-wise, but they've been there for seven to eight years now and everybody knows that VMware is the enterprise solution for virtualization in the DoD.

Some of NSX's most valuable features are:

• Its distributed firewall
• The we can actually extend Layer 2 networking across datacenters, and also Layer 3 networking, which comes along with it.
• The routing and switching.

They could branch out to the physical layer. Today, it's just the virtual layer, and they're starting to talk about the physical layer. We'd like to see the physical layer incorporated.

We've been using NSX now with Layer 2 stretching for approximately 10 months. We're getting ready to really ramp up the DFW, which is the distributed firewall piece, which we and our security team are very excited about.

NSX is a very stable product.

We've already scaled it across two data centers. We'll be incorporating two additional data centers, to give us that footprint, or IP address migration across four data centers. So, it's quite scalable.

The tech support for NSX is awesome. We are a premier production customer for VMware, therefore the tech support and the tech support representatives don't start a lower level. We start at the mid-level of the tech support engineers. Thus, we get answers very quickly. We also work with our technical account manager who knows what we're doing and what we've got coming up, so he's able to push things for us on the tech support side.

Our tech support's awesome.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor (like VMware), it's important to us that they have the following:

• Their name recognition.
• The support that they provide.
• Their placement in the industry as a leader.
• The things that they're doing with NSX, which are phenomenal.

We're a supporter of VMware, and likewise they're a supporter and a partner with us and what we're doing.

It's really a great product. It fits all of our needs. Everything that we've asked it to do or asked VMware to help us get done with it, we've been able to do. Therefore, we're very excited about the product.

The most valuable part of NSX is it's very scalable and automated. Our change request time is really low.

For the most part, it's very stable.

The only hiccup is sometimes during an upgrade, there are hurdles that you can have during that time, but overall it's very stable.

Since we're almost 100% virtual, it's been very scalable for us.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to get to a higher level engineer if you need to, but it takes some work to make that case. Usually it happens, but it's a little difficult.

It seems to be very straightforward. Usually a lot of it's handled by the installer. Yeah, very straightforward. As long as you read the design guide, it's easy.

An important reason for selecting was VMware because they're the hypervisor we use and we see them to be a very valuable asset in purchasing something like NSX, and because they're the owner of the hypervisor and they have direct access into the hypervisor. That's very valuable for us. We foresee it being a very reliable product into the future.

An important reason for selecting was VMware because they're the hypervisor we use and we see them to be a very valuable asset in purchasing something like NSX, and because they're the owner of the hypervisor and they have direct access into the hypervisor. That's very valuable for us. We foresee it being a very reliable product into the future.

They developed the hypervisor, which is very valuable to us, because it has saved us a lot of money just on the micro-segmentation piece. That's basically all we use at this point, but the product has more than paid for itself just with that part of the product.

NSX is extremely invaluable from the standpoint of security.

It does have capabilities of micro-segmenting a network, being able to create smaller segments of various types of applications separated by various tiers.

However, what it's mostly important for is being able to actually set security policies right at the interfacing virtual machine, which we haven't had the ability to do in the past.

So the third-party marketplace is growing and growing for this product and being able to redirect traffic to them, to the third-party products in order to take advantage of those additional features, is wonderful.

I think that one of the more important things to see better integrated into the NSX product would be an IDS/IPS type solution, which right now we're handing off to a third-party, which sometimes doubles the cost of the product. However, there are new products that we're learning about over the course of this week like AppDefense, that may actually help provide some additional capabilities in terms of that IDS/IPS type structure.

There are elements that have been added to it over the years, but its history goes way back with vShield, and has been included in products like vCloud Director, etc. To be honest with you, I've deployed it over the past five to six years and I've had nothing but great success with it.

From a tech support standpoint, as with most VMware text support, the people that we get a hold of on the phone are generally very knowledgeable of the product and have the ability to actually help us through whatever issue we have. We try not to spin our wheels too much. We do try to dig in as much as we can, but as soon as we understand we've gone beyond our limitations we get them on the phone and we've never had an issue trying to get the support we need.

It's a complex product so setup is essentially as easy as the person whose knowledge is being used to install it. There are various elements to it. It can be installed in modules - in a modular fashion. You don't have to install everything right away. And, unfortunately, with this particular product, when you read through all the marketing materials it sounds like it has to be installed completely when, in fact, you can start out with only the pieces you need and add what you need - the other pieces - later as needed.

I always have a hard time giving a ten to anything. I think everything needs improvement. So that's why I would give it a solid eight out of 10.