VMware’s updated portfolio helps provision, optimize and govern hybrid and multi-cloud environments

VMware announced innovations across its portfolio of VMware vRealize Cloud Management on-premises and software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

The new and enhanced product capabilities combine to further enable customers to consistently deploy and operate their applications, infrastructure, and platform services, from the data center to the cloud to the edge.

“Enterprises face multiple challenges in support of their business in these uncertain times,” said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware.

“They seek to modernize their apps, accelerate hybrid and public cloud innovation, and deliver a modern developer environment. VMware is a trusted partner that enables customers to address those IT challenges head on – allowing them to focus on transforming their business.”

Consistent deployment and operations of apps, infrastructure and platform services

VMware vRealize Cloud Management offers new and innovative capabilities for modern infrastructure automation supporting DevOps principles and self-driving operations.

Uniquely available both on-premises and as SaaS, VMware vRealize provides customers with the agility and efficiency of cloud infrastructure at scale, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and DevOps principles such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps to provision, orchestrate, optimize and govern hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

VMware is introducing new releases, capabilities and enhancements spanning VMware vRealize Automation 8.2, VMware vRealize Automation Cloud, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.2, VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud, VMware vRealize Operations 8.2, VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, and VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.2.

AI powered self-driving operations

VMware vRealize Operations delivers self-driving operations from apps to infrastructure to optimize, plan and scale private, hybrid and multiple public clouds. Powered by AI and predictive analytics, it delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, proactive planning, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance.

VMware vRealize Operations 8.2 and VMware vRealize Operations Cloud will feature:

• Kubernetes operations: New and enhanced support for Kubernetes via integration with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Red Hat OpenShift will enable customers to auto-discover and monitor the health, performance, capacity, cost, and configuration of Kubernetes constructs on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS.
• App-to-infrastructure troubleshooting: This latest release will feature integration with popular APM tools such as AppDynamics, Datadog and Dynatrace. It will also include new app discovery via integration with VMware vRealize Network Insight. These two capabilities will help customers predict, prevent and quickly remediate issues in the context of applications.
• Monitoring VMware Cloud and beyond: Improved metric-correlation and new near real-time monitoring will enable enterprise observability, helping customers detect performance and availability issues up to 15x faster. Enhancements to native AWS management will unlock capacity calculations for EC2 instances and automatically import metrics into VMware vRealize Operations for faster troubleshooting.
• Efficient capacity and cost management: Improvements in pricing and costing engine, including daily virtual machine (VM) cost granularity, enhanced metering capabilities, and pricing support for non-VMware vRealize Automation workloads will help customers to further reduce costs.

Similarly, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.2 and vRealize Log Insight Cloud will also introduce enhanced Kubernetes support, deeper integration with VMware Cloud on AWS, and overall usability enhancements.

Today, VMware Skyline is announcing a new simplified onboarding experience. The new process is shorter and more intuitive for customers adopting and expanding the proactive cloud service. Skyline offers proactive intelligence that helps customers avoid problems before they occur and reduces their time spent on resolving active support requests.

Currently, the VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for Skyline offers customers an integrated management and support experience that surfaces potential issues and provides remediation guidance to keep them out of harm’s way.

Delivering modern infrastructure automation

VMware vRealize Automation 8.2 and VMware vRealize Automation Cloud will deliver enhanced capabilities for customers’ most important automation use cases including Modern Automation Platform, DevOps for Infrastructure, Self-Service Cloud and Kubernetes Automation. The new and enhanced VMware vRealize Automation capabilities will include:

• Modern automation platform: Enhanced capabilities to increase agility, security and control including granular role-based access control (RBAC), enhanced support for multi-tenant infrastructure, expanded support for Day 2 actions and network automation with NSX policy APIs.
• DevOps for infrastructure: Enhanced Infrastructure as Code capabilities with the introduction of VMware Cloud Templates as the templating engine for VMware Cloud infrastructure. This also includes management of Terraform configurations from the service catalog.
• Self-service cloud: Enhanced integration with VMware Cloud Foundation to further simplify private cloud setup for customers.
• Kubernetes automation: Self-service provisioning of Kubernetes namespaces via the service catalog with support for VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu.

The lifecycle management capabilities of the VMware vRealize Suite help customers speed time to value by automating the deployment, configuration and upgrading of products in the suite.

VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.2 will deploy and manage vRealize Suite products on VMware Cloud on AWS, support vRealize Operations product re-sizing and scaling capabilities as well as continuous availability architecture, and configure single or multiple data sources for vRealize Network Insight.

It will also introduce support for compliance certifications including Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) 2.0 and Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS).

Product availability

VMware vRealize Automation 8.2, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.2, VMware vRealize Operations 8.2 and VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.2 are all expected to become available in VMware’s Q3 FY21.

Additionally, the new capabilities and enhancements to VMware vRealize Automation Cloud, VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud and VMware vRealize Operations Cloud are also expected to become available in VMware’s Q3 FY21.

“The time saved by the new portal is dramatic. If in the past, the developer had to spend a half day up to a whole day manually installing a development environment, now, when using VMware vRealize Automation, it takes only up to 40 minutes to automatically deploy.

“The developers efforts are concentrated were they are really needed – in development and not in deployment.” – Daniel Sahar, DevOps Engineer, VERINT