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VMware said June 6 that it is releasing a series of updates to its vRealize cloud management platform, largely because enterprises are understanding and adopting the hybrid-cloud concept faster than expected.
The vRealize Suite enables users to manage and provision workloads at scale, including computing, network, storage and application services in hybrid cloud environments. The platform’s management capabilities for the software-defined data center and through multiple clouds help customers to address three common use cases — intelligent operations, automated IT and DevOps-ready IT–based on thousands of customer engagements.
“We’ve watched the evolution of cloud from on-prem to public cloud and now to hybrid, and we are seeing a lot of customers doing both,” David Jasso, VMware Director of Product Marketing for the Cloud Management Platform, told eWEEK. “We’re addressing this trend–including the choices of running our cloud on AWS and/or Azure–in everything we do.
“This is happening on the app side, too, with customers spinning up apps on premises, cloud-native containerized apps, and so on, and in several types of clouds. A big focus for us is to enable IT teams to embrace solving the needs of their developers in a way that gives them the freedom to give whatever those app development teams need to do to get the job done.”
VMware Basically Fortifying Its Cloud Management Toolset
To do this, VMware is fortifying its cloud management platform in the areas of automation, intelligent operations and DevOps-ready IT.
On the intelligent operations side, VMware has built an entirely new user interface with more than 20 new dashboards for users who may not be familiar with the technology. This will gives them, in natural language, options to research deeper into what they need to know.
VMware is also introducing native vSAN (virtual storage-area network) management to vRealize Operations 6.6, in addition to more multi-cloud support with Azure and AWS enhancement. The company also has added automated workload balancing to vRealize Operations 6.6 in an effort to get to a state of airtight systems operations management.
When it comes to DevOps-type IT, VMware has included improved container management to vRealize Automation 7.3. This means added support for Docker volumes and the Docker Remote API. vRealize Automation 7.3 also includes a configuration management tool framework and database-as-a-service enhancements.
In short, key new vRealize features include:
—Automated workload placement: vRealize Operations 6.6 adds 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 also features 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, deduplication and compression savings, and reclamation opportunities for hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions powered by vSAN. Additionally, the new release will 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 has support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) networking and security to enable users to plan security by AWS Virtual Private Cloud and AWS tags. Users 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.
—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.
Pricing and Availability
VMware said that 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 Aug. 4.
vRealize Network Insight 3.4 is now available in two editions, Advanced and Enterprise, beginning at $1,245 per CPU.
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