VMware Inc. announced major updates to its vRealize cloud management platform. These updates can improve software-defined data center (SDDC), cloud operations, and accelerate application, and infrastructure service delivery across hybrid clouds. The updates include VMware vRealize Operations 6.6, VMware vRealize Automation 7.3, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3, vRealize Log Insight 4.5, and vRealize Network Insight 3.4. Along with these updates VMware is increasing its support for containers and configuration management solutions.
VMware Inc. announced major updates to its vRealize cloud management platform. These updates can improve software-defined data center (SDDC), cloud operations, and accelerate application, and infrastructure service delivery across hybrid clouds. The updates include VMware vRealize Operations 6.6, VMware vRealize Automation 7.3, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3, vRealize Log Insight 4.5, and vRealize Network Insight 3.4. Along with these updates VMware is increasing its support for containers and configuration management solutions.
According to VMware, vRealize Suite can enable customers to manage and provision at scale — compute, network, storage and application services across hybrid cloud environments. The platform helps users address the three most common use cases (intelligent operations, automated IT and DevOps-ready IT) with its comprehensive management capabilities for the SDDC and across multiple clouds. Also the new UI in vRealize Operatin Manager not only allows admins to spot an issue, they can take action on the same screen without going back to vSphere.
New features to benefit all three use cases include:
- Automated, Proactive Workload Placement: vRealize Operations 6.6 adds substantial new intelligence to workload placement decisions to fully automate workload balancing across clusters and datastores based on business imperatives, including ability to schedule rebalancing in a convenient maintenance window. This release will also feature predictive Distributed Resource Scheduler (pDRS) combining analytics from vRealize Operations with vSphere DRS to predict anomalies and act before contention occurs.
- VMware vSAN Operations Management: vRealize Operations 6.6 will deliver native vSAN management and monitoring, including capacity and time remaining, dedupe and compression savings, and reclamation opportunities. It will also enable centralized management of multi-site and stretched clusters with advanced troubleshooting, proactive alerting and visibility from VM to disk.
- Combined Operational and Business Insights: The new release will bring vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 as a tab in vRealize Operations 6.6 for new insights that show how capacity utilization drives cost efficiencies by combining operational and cost metrics. New vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 will improve insight into the complete costs of AWS and Microsoft Azure instances alongside VMware-based private cloud costs.
- Cross-Cloud Security and Networking Management: vRealize Network Insight 3.4 will introduce support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) networking and security to enable users to plan security by AWS Virtual Private Cloud and AWS tags. Customers will be able to add AWS EC2 VMs to user-defined applications for micro-segmentation planning and troubleshooting traffic in AWS.
- VMware NSX Operations: vRealize Automation 7.3 adds increased support for NSX- related operations including the setting of advanced NSX controls for load balancing, network and security functions for Day 1 and Day 2 operations.
- Automated, Proactive Workload Placement: vRealize Automation 7.3 dramatically improves placement decision capabilities when considering where to provision newly requested virtual machines. Users now have the option to set a placement policy within vRealize Operations and have vRealize Automation consume it.
- Container Management Enhancements: vRealize Automation 7.3 now features Admiral 1.1, the highly scalable and lightweight container management portal. Support for Admiral 1.1 enables users to manage Virtual Container Host instances generated by VMware vSphere Integrated Containers as well as Docker hosts. The new release also provides support for Docker volumes enabling users to create and attach volumes to containers.
- Leveraging Configuration Management Solutions: vRealize Automation 7.3 introduces a new framework to enable configuration management tools as first-class citizens with Puppet being the first ecosystem partner. Customers can now seamlessly deploy, configure and manage production-ready OS, middleware and applications by using vRealize Automation's blueprinting, service orchestration and governance workflows along with capabilities delivered by configuration management tools
- Blueprints Parameterization Improvements: vRealize Automation 7.3 drastically improves reusability of blueprints and lowers customers’ TCO through the introduction of parameterized blueprints. Service designers will be able to directly define the “T-shirt sizing” (i.e. small, medium, large) for specific resources into blueprints and easily tailor services to their personal needs through “sizing” parameters.
- Microsoft Azure Public Cloud Integration: vRealize Automation 7.3 enhances support for Microsoft Azure by enabling deployment and management of middleware and application services.
VMware Cross-Cloud architecture can enable consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications, running on- and off-premises, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor. Building on leading private and hybrid cloud capabilities, the Cross-Cloud architecture offers customers the freedom to innovate in multiple clouds. Cross-Cloud architecture will be delivered through VMware’s Cloud Foundation.
Availability and Pricing
VMware vRealize Automation 7.3 and VMware vRealize Network Insight 3.4 are now available. VMware vRealize Operations 6.6, VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3, VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.5 are expected to be available by August, 2017.
The software can be purchased collectively as part of VMware vRealize Suite which starts at $3,745 per Portable Licensing Unit (PLU) or standalone. vRealize Network Insight 3.4 is now available in two editions – Advanced and Enterprise Editions – beginning at $1,245 per CPU.
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