Announcing GA of vRNI 5.3 & Upgrade Considerations

vRealize Network Insight – vRNI – 5.3 has just been released this July,14th 2020 ! vRNI is my favourite tool, and you’re gonna know why, when you evaluate & adopt it!

The VMWare vision framework is to help the customers proactively manage their (cloud-) infrastructure to ultimately support business in mission critical workloads – workload being virtual compute resources required to run an application.

True as it may be that … all companies are workload companies!

Significantly, vRNI helps you support those applications by giving you the visibility and power over the infrastructure that supports these applications.

With vRNI you get into migration planning and app security planning with end to end network visibility.

vRNI 5.3 New Release Overview

vRealize Network Insight 5.3 – Build 1593829198

Release Notes: Click Here  |  What’s New  |  Product Upgrade   |  VMware MIB Files  |  Resolved Issues  |  Known Issues

Download: Click Here

What’s New in the New Release vRNI 5.3

VMware NSX-T Day 2 Ops Troubleshooting

• Introduces a set of new events for hosts and network utilization
• Supports new flow retransmit count metrics
• Displays Infrastructure latency metrics vNIC to vNIC, vNIC to pNIC, pNIC to vNIC, VTEP to VTEP

3rd Party Devices Monitoring

• Supports HPE Switches, Mellanox Switches

VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud Monitoring and Troubleshooting 

VMware Cloud on AWS

Additionally

• Support added for Cisco Nexus switches with NXOS 9.2.2, Cisco ACI 4.2.3, Checkpoint Firewall R80.30, Juniper JunOS with v17, and Palo Alto Networks Panorama 9.1

-> Beware that some new features listed are dependent on licensing entitlements

Upgrade Considerations for vRNI 5.3

For VMware Premier Support customers, I recommended to open a Proactive Support Request at least 1 week prior to the start of the upgrade -> How to file a Proactive Support Request in MyVMware (2146880)

vRNI 5.3 supports a direct upgrade from 5.2 and 5.1 versions.

Network Insight upgrades are performed in a sequence upgrade steps.

In this respect, don’t forget to check the upgrade steps as outlined in the upgrade path matrix and refer to the Upgrading vRealize Network Insight section for more information on upgrade options.

vRNI does not support rollback or product downgrade. You must take a backup before you proceed to upgrade. More information about the backup and restore process, see the KB article Best practices to backup a vRealize Network Insight Cluster (55829)

Important: Planning your upgrade is recommended. Depending on size of environment & nodes, upgrades may take considerable time.

Must-go Reference Links for vRNI 5.3

vRNI 5.3 has been released and to begin with, read the Known Issues section of the Release Notes, Upgrade Paths & System Recommendations and Requirements !

Furthermore, if you want to know even more:

• What’s New with 5.3  How To Solve The Virtual & Physical Network Puzzle ebook
• The Remote Worker Pinboard in vRealize Network Insight
• Search Query Posters: VMware came up with a series of vRNI search query cheat sheets to help you to get insights faster.
• Managing PCI Compliance with vRealize Network Insight
• VMware Product Interoperability Matrix
• Ports Used 
• System Recommendations and Requirements

Check-out our last posts:  

• https://mysticmarvin.eu/vsphere-7-part-4-trust-authority
• https://mysticmarvin.eu/dellemc-announced-the-futur-of-vxrail/
• https://mysticmarvin.eu/marvins-notes-from-the-field-vxrail-manager-connectivity/
• https://mysticmarvin.eu/vsphere-7-part-3-identity-federation/
• https://mysticmarvin.eu/vsphere-7-part-2-certificate-management/
• https://mysticmarvin.eu/introducing-2nd-version-vmwarecloud-on-dellemc/
• https://mysticmarvin.eu/vsphere-7-part-1-new-logic-for-vmotion/
• https://mysticmarvin.eu/vsphere-7-whats-new-in-a-nutshell/
• https://mysticmarvin.eu/vsan-best-practices-part-iii/
• https://mysticmarvin.eu/vxrail-7-software-released/