VMware introduces new Cloud Management Platform; vRealize

VMware introduced major updates across its VMware vRealize cloud management platform to improve software-defined data center (SDDC) and cloud operations and accelerate application and infrastructure service delivery across hybrid clouds.

New releases 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, which combine to provide enterprise customers with advanced intelligent operations and automated IT capabilities to more easily stand up and operate a VMware-based cloud. Additionally, VMware is introducing increased support for containers and configuration management solutions to ease moving applications from dev-test to production.

The VMware vRealize Suite enables customers to manage and provision at scale--compute, network, storage and application services across hybrid cloud environments. The platform’s comprehensive management capabilities for the SDDC and across multiple clouds help customers to address three common use cases--intelligent operations, automated IT and DevOps-ready IT--based on thousands of customer engagements.

“VMware is committed to supporting our customers’ digital transformation initiatives by helping them to modernize their data centers as well as integrate their public clouds,” said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. “These latest updates to our vRealize platform will help customers get more out of their hybrid cloud investments today, and put them on a path for cross-cloud management of applications and infrastructure regardless of where the workload is running.”

Plan, Manage and Scale SDDC and Multi-Cloud Environments with Intelligent Operations

Intelligent operations help enterprises to plan, manage and scale their SDDC and multi-cloud deployments with confidence - addressing operations management for everything from applications to infrastructure. New vRealize features addressing this use case 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 VMware 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--no longer requiring a separate download and installation of a management pack. Capabilities include capacity and time remaining, dedupe and compression savings, and reclamation opportunities for hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions powered by vSAN. Additionally, the new release will also enable centralized management of multi-site and stretched cluster vSAN environments 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.

 Automating IT to Deliver Faster Time to Implementation and Lower Customer TCO

The Automated IT use case helps IT organizations speed up service delivery by providing them the capabilities to fully automate core IT processes. New features include:

• 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 significantly 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.

 Accelerating Application Delivery with DevOps Ready IT

The Developer-Ready IT use case helps IT teams to meet the needs of developers who want to use the tools of their choice yet enable IT to seamlessly move applications from a laptop into production. New features include:

• 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 substantially 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 application and middleware services.

Product 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 become available in VMware’s Q2 FY18 which ends August 4, 2017.

vRealize Network Insight 3.4 is now available in two editions – Advanced and Enterprise – beginning at $1,245 per CPU.