vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) delivers intelligent operations for your software defined network environment (specially NSX). In short, it does what vRealize Operations does for your virtualized environment, but only to the SDN environment. With the help of this product you can optimize network performance and availability with visibility and analytics across virtual and physical networks. Provide planning and recommendations for implementing micro-segmentation security, plus operational views to quickly and confidently manage and scale VMware NSX deployment.
This product comes with the following two OVA files.
VMware_vRealize_Network_Insight_3.4_platform.ova
VMware_vRealize_Network_Insight_3.4_proxy.ova
Below are the system requirement for the OVA deployment.
System Requirements:
- vRealize Network Insight Platform OVA:
– 8 cores – Reservation 4096 Mhz
– 32 GB RAM – Reservation – 16GB
– 750 GB – HDD, Thin provisioned
- vRealize Network Insight Proxy OVA
- 4 cores – Reservation 2048 Mhz
- 10 GB RAM – Reservation – 5GB
- 150 GB – HDD, Thin provisioned
- VMware vCenter Server (version 5.5 and 6.0).
- vCenter Server Credentials with privileges:
- Distributed Switch: Modify
- dvPort group: Modify
- VMware ESXi:
- 5.5 Update 2 (Build 2068190) and above
- 6.0 Update 1b (Build 3380124) and above
- VMware Tools is installed on all the virtual machines in the data center. This helps in identifying the VM to VM traffic.
The deployment is relatively straight forward, similar to deploying any other OVA.
Select the Data center
For my environment, I am going with the medium configuration.
Select the datastore to be used by the virtual appliance.
I am going with the thin provisioning option, however I would strongly recommend to use for thick provision in production environment.
Below, simply enter the basic networking details.
Once done, click on finish and wait for the virtual appliance deployment completion.
You can open the virtual appliance console to check the progress of appliance deployment.
Once Appliance is successfully deployed and powered on, go to the configuration screen by going to https://<IP or FQDN of the appliance> . The first thing is to enter the vRNI license and click on validate.
Once the license is validated, setup the admin password for the appliance login. Click on activate
Next, you need to generate the secret for the proxy VM. Click on Generate button to generate the Secret.
Copy the shared secret. Platform Appliance will wait for the deployment of Proxy VM. It will keep looking for it till the time proxy VM is deployed.
Let’s go ahead and deploy the Proxy VM .I will not cover the Proxy VM deployment again, it’s relatively straight forward and similar to the platform appliance deployment.
During Proxy Appliance deployment under property, you need to paste the shared secret generated during the platform virtual appliance
Once the deployment is done and the Proxy VM is up and running, it is automatically sensed in the main configuration page.
Click on finish and login to the vRNI GUI using “admin@local” user and password that you have setup initially.
First thing after logging in to the appliance for the first time is adding the data sources (vCenter Server and NSX manager).
On the top right corner, click on Profile -> settings ->Data Sources ->Add new data sources.
Enter the vCenter server admin credentials and validate to check if vRNI is able to connect to vCenter Server successfully 
Similarly add NSX manager as a data source to vRNI and validate.
This conclude the vRNI appliance deployment and initial configuration.
To enable the L2 Bridging, click on the Publish Changes button, and wait until the page refreshes.
Saurav Issar 