Today VMware, Inc. announced updates and innovations to its CloudHealth and vRealize Cloud Management. These updates focus on cloud management both on-prem and SaaS. The updates are said to help customers with monitoring, securing, optimizing, and automating their VMware Cloud and native public cloud services.
Today VMware, Inc. announced updates and innovations to its CloudHealth and vRealize Cloud Management. These updates focus on cloud management both on-prem and SaaS. The updates are said to help customers with monitoring, securing, optimizing, and automating their VMware Cloud and native public cloud services.
Acquired in 2018, CloudHealth is the company’s multi-cloud management platform that is aimed at financial management, operations, and security and compliance. Updates today include support for Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreements (EAs) in CloudHealth FlexReports. This means customers can select both Azure EA and AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) to evaluate costs using various dimensions and filter criteria. With AWS, CloudHealth has introduced automated recommendations for the AWS Savings Plans. Meaning once customers build a savings plan quote, they can automate the savings plan purchase using the CloudHealth Platform. Customers can also explore different Compute Savings Plan commitment level scenarios to see which one works best for them.
VMware vRealize Cloud Management
VMware is tackling automation in cloud management with VMware vRealize Automation 8.4. 8.4 runs through the gamut of helping customers with modern self-service multi-cloud infrastructure, intelligent network automation, and event-driven configuration automation. 8.4 has tighter integration with the Salt Project and advanced multi-cloud provisioning and governance across Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and VMware Cloud.
VMware vRealize Automation 8.4 key features include:
- Enhanced Public Cloud Provisioning Support: Will provide customers with enhanced public cloud provisioning support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. For Microsoft Azure, this release will include support for existing availability sets, custom images from an Azure image gallery, and Azure disk encryption sets. For Google Cloud, this release will support sole-tenant provisioning.
- Enhanced vRealize Automation SaltStack Config Integration: Powered by the Salt Project, customers will benefit from simplified installation, set-up, and deployment of vRealize Automation SaltStack Config via tighter integration with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.
- Expanded Network Automation with NSX-T Migration Support: The enhanced vRealize Automation Migration Assistant tool will further help NSX customers to simplify and accelerate migrations from NSX for vSphere (NSX-V) to NSX-T environments.
- Enhanced Self-Service Automation for VMware Cloud on AWS: VMware vRealize Automation Cloud integration with VMware Cloud on AWS will enable VMware Cloud on AWS customers to activate vRealize Automation Cloud with a single click and help automate the setup of the necessary cloud resources. Customers will also be able to use vRealize Automation to automate VMware Cloud on AWS security groups.
The company has also updated its VMware vRealize Operations to 8.4. This update uses AI and predictive analytics to deliver self-driving operations from apps to infrastructure to better optimize, plan and scale private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
VMware vRealize Operations 8.4 key features include:
- Increased AWS Services Support: vRealize Operations will dramatically expand coverage of the most popular native AWS services—supporting 57 total services going forward—helping customers further automate and simplify operations of those services.
- Enhanced VMware Cloud on AWS Costing: will enable customers to calculate the cost of their VMware Cloud on AWS VMs and clusters using their VMware Cloud on AWS bills. This includes running reports and tracking the potential savings of reclamation from powered-off VMs, idle VMs, VM snapshots, orphaned disks, and oversized VMs. Additionally, customers will benefit from the ability to produce a single dashboard spanning VMware Cloud on AWS and on-premises VMware vSphere costs.
- Enhanced Cost Flow Optimization: This major update for vRealize Operations cost management will provide cost flow guidance to customers helping them improve their cost-efficiency. With 10 new dashboards, customers will improve and visualize costs, including return on investment, the total cost of ownership, potential cost savings, and more.
- New VMware Cloud on AWS What-if Planning: Customers will be able to predict demand, plan for future capacity needs and get actional insights with new capacity planning capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS. The new features will include the ability to assess the capacity utilization trends, understand how soon they will run out with time remaining, and the cost impact of adding or removing VMs from an existing VMware Cloud on AWS environment.
- New Support for Open Source Telegraf Agent: vRealize Operations will expand the ways customers monitor their apps by enabling them to pull metrics from any app using any of the open-source Telegraf agent plugins or by developing their own. Plus, customers will be able to monitor these apps anywhere—whether they are running in a VMware environment or on bare metal servers.
Yet another core piece that sees an 8.4 update is VMware vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Log Insight Cloud. The latest version introduces efficient storage partitions and extensive multi-cloud observability capabilities. VMware has updated the Log Partitions as rules that now segregate data into partitions to tier out different storage media based on performance and cost. The new release is said to feature multi-cloud observability across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform logs.
For network management, VMware is updating vRealize Network Insight to 6.2 and updating vRealize network Insight Cloud. The updates are said to now provide an end-to-end network view by learning from multiple data sources across the virtual and physical infrastructure. VMware vRealize Network Insight makes it easier for customers to plan, build, and manage networks by leveraging machine learning.
VMware vRealize Network Insight to 6.2 updates include:
Improved Network Visibility for VMware Cloud on AWS: These capabilities will enable network visibility of intra-SDDC Groups and AWS Transit Connect traffic flows to help customers with their cost analysis to better measure and optimize network performance.
- VMware Cloud: New network visibility for both Google Cloud VMware Engine and Azure VMware Solution will provide users have more capabilities to correlate application performance across more multi-cloud environments.
- Machine Learning Flow-Based Application Discovery: This Will help IT staff efficiently prepare for migration planning by dynamically grouping VMs whether in the cloud or on-premises into application groups as well as discover application boundaries. This enhancement will be newly available for vRealize Network Insight (on-premises) customers and improved for vRealize Network Insight Cloud (SaaS) customers.
- Enhanced Assurance and Verification: Will deliver usability and scale improvements for business intent validation and help enable a more proactive network.
- VMware NSX-T: Improved metrics thresholds as well as a new search query and filtering capabilities for BGP and Equal-cost multi-path (ECMP).
- VMware SD-WAN: Customers will have improved visibility with application heat maps that help pinpoint critical issues for faster troubleshooting resolution.
Finally, VMware is expanding its proactive issue avoidance for VMware NSX-T, vSAN, and vSphere Virtual Volumes. Through VMware Skyline, the company will help customers take a proactive approach by finding issues and making recommendations before they cause an issue. There will also be enhancements to Log Assist as well and in-product email notifications.
New enhancements include:
- New Proactive Findings and Recommendations: Additional Findings and Recommendations for VMware vSAN, vSphere Virtual Volumes, and NSX-T.
- Log Assist Enhancements: Improved UI to help enable successful automated support log bundle transfer to VMware Technical Support and segment tracking for a number of hosts and objects selected in a particular log transfer.
- Enhanced Email Notifications: Inclusion of Organization ID and Organization Name in login inactivity notification emails to alert customers to the specific Skyline organizations that have not been logged into recently.
Availability
The new capabilities and enhancements to CloudHealth by VMware, VMware vRealize Automation Cloud, VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud, and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud are available now.
VMware vRealize Operations 8.4, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.4, VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.4, and VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.2 are expected to be available in VMware’s Q1 FY22 (ending April 30, 2021).
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