In last post of this series we discussed briefly about what is vRNI and why you should have it your environment. In this post we will look into the deployments steps.

The current version of vRealize Network Insight is 3.4. I am going to deploy the same in my lab. 

The installation process for VMware vRNI is a two-step process that includes:

• Deploying VMware vRNI platform appliance.
• Deploying VMware vRNI proxy appliance.

Following are the resource requirements for deploying the Platform and Proxy OVA.

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, Thick provisioned

Lets jump into lab and start the deployment process. To keep the length of the post to a reasonable length, I have omitted the deployment steps of the ova file except the final network information input screens where you have to define IP/Netmask/GW/DNS/NTP etc.

Apart from network settings, you will find advance configuration option where you need to provide HTTP proxy information or the log server information. Along with that, the “Log Push to the Cloud Setting” option is also provided here. If you select this option then the logs will be pushed to VMware server in Cloud.

I do not have much info on this at the moment so I left it blank.

Now wait for VM to boot up and then connect to https://vRNI-IP or FQDN/ and accept the browser’s certificate warnings.

Next you have to provide the license key to activate the product. Click on validate button after providing the key.

Once your license is validated, it shows you details of the license and asks for Activation. Click on Activate button to activate the license. Also you have to set password of the admin user here. 

Next we have to  generate the secret for the proxy VM. This secret is needed when you are deploying the proxy VM. Click on Generate button to generate the Secret. Once the secret is generated we have the Copy button to copy the secret.

Now its time to deploy our proxy VM. If you look closer at the above screenshot then you will see that the platform is looking for the proxy VM. Deployment steps for proxy VM is same as platform VM only with difference is that you need to provide the above generated secret at the deployment stage of the OVA.

Wait for Proxy VM deployment to finish and VM comes online. Hit finish once the platform VM detects presence of the proxy VM.

Login to vRNI console using username “admin@local” and password set in previous step where you activated the license. 

If you wanna Join CEIP,leave the checkbox selected and hit finish.

Below screen shows you the dashboard where you can check and monitor various things of your NSX powered environment. This dashboard is empty as of now because we have not added any endpoints yet.

In next post of this series we will look into how to configure vRNI appliance.

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