Today VMware announced VMware vRealize Suite 7. vRealize Suite is VMware’s Cloud Management Platform solution (CMP). While Cloud Management Platform’s have been part of the IT landscape for several years now, with the release of vRealize Suite 7, it’s probably a good time to step back to better understand the need for a Cloud Management Platform and how VMware addresses this need.
Market Context
Every industry is experiencing massive changes in both business and operating models as a result of digitization. Companies in all industries are responding to new opportunities to innovate in the area of online or connected customer experience by leveraging big data and mobility. Many more are pursuing new business models and new revenue streams that rely on digitizing and modernizing how business is done.
The phenomenon of digitization along with other structural changes is driving the need to dramatically speed up application delivery. Being first to market can mean significant competitive advantage. Being late to market can mean missed opportunity or worse.
The need to get applications to market quickly is generating increased expectations on IT to rapidly provide resources to Development and QA teams and to support the rapid rollout to production of new or updated applications. The inability of IT teams to meet these expectations is a major reason that the public cloud market has exploded.
While delivering resources quickly is important, speed alone isn’t enough. Policy-driven governance must be in place to ensure efficient resource utilization. Fined grained application level security is also critical to meet compliance requirements and to mitigate the risk of data breaches. Resources delivered must be reliable and perform in a manner that meets the quality of service (QOS) expectations. And while the business wants IT to be more responsive, speed at any cost isn’t an option. Most often, IT teams must address the need for speed within existing budgets and staffing.
Cloud Management Platform
Resource provisioning in many organizations can best be characterized as a combination of automated and manual steps; performed by multiple individuals; and strung together by a series of help desk tickets that move the provisioning process from one small task to the next. The inefficiency embedded in this approach means that for many organizations, fulfilling a request for resources can take multiple weeks and sometimes even months – a time scale that is increasingly unacceptable to IT’s customers.
The concept of a cloud management platform emerged initially as a response to the requirement that IT be able to provision resources more quickly and efficiently. By standardizing and automating the delivery of resources, a Cloud Management Platform dramatically speeds up resource delivery. And while many Cloud Management Platforms will provision resources, a true Enterprise-ready Cloud Management Platform also delivers the ability to manage resources through their entire lifecycle.
For instance, an Enterprise-ready Cloud Management Platform provides the ability to continuously monitor resource utilization along with the ability to scale up or down resources as necessary to meet changing business demands. Once a service is no longer needed, an Enterprise-ready Cloud Management Platform should also provide the ability to reclaim capacity and to make that capacity available for new requests. The ability to manage resources across the entire service lifecycle helps to optimize both operational and capital budgets.
VMware’s Cloud Management Platform Vision
VMware is focused on the creation of an “app-aware, self-optimizing” hybrid cloud management platform delivering our customers a competitive edge as a digital business. In addition to innovating around these core principles, VMware is also committed to delivering an Enterprise-ready Cloud Management Platform capable of addressing a comprehensive set of hybrid cloud management requirements. The combination of VMware’s vision and its focus of delivering an Enterprise-ready solution distinguishes VMware from other vendors in the Cloud Management Platform marketplace.
Enterprise-ready Cloud Management Platform (CMP)
A Complete Solution: VMware delivers the industry’s most complete CMP solution. VMware’s CMP gives organizations the ability to provision and manage at scale – compute, storage, network and application services across private and public cloud environments. The solution is also heterogeneous, providing the ability to manage both vSphere and non-vSphere hypervisors.
VMware’s CMP allows companies to address cloud management requirements across day one and day two operations. Day one capabilities support the need to provision resources quickly and efficiently across both private and public clouds. Embedded policy management gives organizations control over decisions such as “where resources are provisioned” and “who can request resources”.
Day two capabilities start with the ability to intelligently monitor and manage the health and performance of infrastructure and applications across physical, virtual and cloud environments in order to meet business SLAs. Capacity management combined with companion automation capabilities to right-size, reclaim and retire already provisioned resources, helps organizations achieve the best use of data center resources. VMware’s CMP also provides day two capabilities that help IT teams understand and manage the costs of both private and public cloud resources.
Being a complete solution also means recognizing that enterprises have a variety of 3rd party and custom built solutions. Because of this VMware delivers a CMP that is highly extensible. Well documented APIs; SDKs; prebuilt management packs and plug-ins that provide integration with 3rd party ISV solutions; and other extensibility mechanisms support interoperability across the IT ecosystem.
Best for SDDC: Native integrations across VMware technologies makes VMware’s CMP the best choice for organizations building out a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) based on VMware. VMware’s CMP solution integrates management capabilities across Operations (VMware vRealize Operations), Automation (VMware vRealize Automation) and Business (VMware vRealize Business).
The integration across these management domains means that VMware can provide a holistic and integrated approach to the management of a SDDC. For example, within VMware’s CMP, operational capabilities that highlight resource inefficiencies within the infrastructure are connected with automation capabilities that can manage the reclamation of unused resources.
VMware’s CMP technologies are also natively integrated with other VMware SDDC solutions. For instance, VMware NSX constructs such as networking and firewalling are natively available for inclusion in service templates created using VMware’s CMP. This means that virtual networks, load balancers, and firewalls can be instantiated on demand when provisioning resources.
VMware’s strong focus on integrations across the SDDC is tightly connected to its vision of delivering an app aware and self-optimizing platform. Through its focus on integrations and the principles of application awareness and self-optimization, VMware is striving to deliver a CMP that can continuously enable the most efficient initial placement, rebalancing, and reclamation of resources.
A Trusted Market Leader: VMware is a trusted vendor and a market leader. VMware virtualization technologies have saved IT organizations large and small billions of dollars in capital expenses. Through the SDDC, VMware is re-imagining the data center by extending the paradigm of resource abstraction to all infrastructure domains, across both on premise and public cloud environments.
VMware’s Cloud Management Platform is a critical capability within a SDDC architecture and the cloud management capabilities that comprise the Cloud Management Platform have been proven through thousands of deployments across both mission critical and large scale environments. Customers trust in VMware, along with the technical strength of VMware’s cloud management offerings, have made VMware the leading vendor in both Cloud Systems Management and Cloud Automation.
