Case Study: Large United States Federal Agency achieves complete east–west virtualized data center visibility with Keysight (Ixia vTaps & Vision ONE)

Ixia vTaps and Vision ONETM Addresses Changing Government Infrastructure

Large United States Federal Agency faced major blind spots after moving to a highly virtualized VMware environment: east–west traffic between VMs was invisible, native ESXi port mirroring introduced security, performance and tunneling/management issues, and the agency needed secure, distributed access to virtual traffic without disrupting workloads. Keysight addressed these challenges with its Ixia vTaps and Vision ONE packet broker visibility platform.

Keysight deployed 100 vTaps and two Vision ONE packet brokers to build an integrated visibility architecture offering source filtering, GRE/ERSPAN/VLAN tunneling, SSL decryption, NetFlow generation and tool-agnostic forwarding. The deployment delivered 100% visibility of inter-VM east–west traffic, reduced bandwidth and resource use by filtering at the vTap, supported hitless installs and vMotion, and enabled the agency’s analytics tools to perform trend analysis; the agency is now planning a rollout across seven data centers—several thousand vTaps and additional NPBs—demonstrating clear operational and security gains.