In my February 10th blog, I highlighted what an Enterprise-Ready Cloud Management Platform is all about. In this blog I want to focus on how customers are actually using, VMware’s CMP, VMware vRealize Suite, to address three specific high value use cases.
Primary CMP Use Cases
VMware has been working with customers building and managing private and hybrid clouds for many years. Through our interaction with customers, VMware has found that customers adopting a CMP are generally looking to solve problems in three key areas:
- Intelligent Operations Management
- Automated IT to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- DevOps-Ready IT
For some customers, the approach to addressing these use cases follows a linear pattern. These customers are on a journey that starts with getting increased operational visibility into highly virtualized and cloud environments. This increased visibility supports a desire to be more efficient and to move from being reactive to being proactive as it relates to meeting service level agreements. A logical next step for many organizations is to then focus on improving IT agility by adding increasing levels of automation, allowing IT teams to respond to stakeholders much more rapidly when line of business partners request additional resources.
While the concept of journey does map well to the approach of many customers, it is not necessary for an organization to address these use cases in a linear fashion. It is the needs of the business that dictate the order in which these use cases are addressed. For instance, if developer productivity is the number one pain point for an organization, there is no requirement that organizations address intelligent operations before they embark on DevOps-Ready IT.
Use Cases Further Explored
Use Case: Intelligent Operations Management
Increased scale, more dynamic workloads and the adoption of hybrid cloud computing has added a tremendous amount of complexity to today’s application environments. And as companies expand their use of applications that directly interact with customers, the number of mission critical applications is expanding. While applications are more important than ever, managing applications has become much more challenging due to a number of factors:
- The number of resources that need to be managed has grown tremendously.
- Today’s workloads are much more dynamic than in the past.
- Hybrid application environments have increased operational complexity.
To fully manage the performance, availability and capacity of a hybrid environment, you need to understand application, compute, network and storage characteristics with a solution that can scale to manage environments with potentially tens of thousands of physical and virtual servers, network and storage devices across a multi-cloud landscape. VMware’s cloud management platform gives you a single view across resources within a virtualized or cloud environment, on-premises or off, based on VMware or third-party technologies. With vRealize Suite you can:
- Proactively solve performance issues.
- Continuously monitor and manage capacity.
- Streamline processes with customizable policies, guided remediation and automated enforcement of standards.
- Understand the cost and consumption of private and public cloud services.
This video of Autotrader.com is a great example of a company using vRealize to address Intelligent Operations. AutoTrader.com uses vRealize to provide comprehensive visibility into real-time performance across a complex environment.
Use Case: Automated IT and IaaS
The growth of public cloud raised the bar for IT responsiveness and IT teams are modernizing their approach to delivering shared service infrastructure. While maintaining a relatively static headcount, IT has to respond faster to a higher volume of requests and still maximize their budgets through the efficient use of resources. Many IT teams have partially automated service delivery through scripts and configuration management tools but there remains a huge opportunity for further improvement. The challenges to speed and efficiency here include:
- Provisioning resources still requires significant human intervention, resulting in errors and lost productivity.
- Standardization has been lagging. Too many models and too much variability makes response time slower than acceptable to line of business partners.
- An inability to track and manage deployed resources leaves IT teams unable to maximize the use of data center resources.
vRealize Suite makes provisioning resources faster, with better utilization of data center resources and IT staff time. The solution allows teams to:
- Embed automation and policy within blueprints, allowing production ready infrastructure to be stood up in minutes rather than weeks.
- Right-size, reclaim or retire already provisioned resources in order to maximize capital expenditures.
- Continuously monitor the health, performance, capacity and costs of already provisioned resources.
Tribune Media uses VMware vRealize and VMware NSX software to deliver what they call a “frictionless enterprise”. Using VMware solutions, Tribune Media has been able to increase the number of IT projects delivered to the business by 214%. The team was also able to reduce the cost of IT by 80% while achieving 5 nines of uptime. Check out this video to better understand the impact that vRealize along with VMware NSX has had in helping the IT team of Tribune Media deliver more to the overall business.
Use Case: DevOps-Ready IT
Organizations moving toward DevOps-Ready IT are focused on speeding up the delivery of software applications and making development teams as productive as possible. Because of concerns related to data (privacy, security, compliance, sovereignty, etc.), many companies are addressing DevOps initiatives within a private or hybrid cloud environment. Being successful in DevOps initiatives requires cross-team cooperation and a commitment across teams to work differently than in the past. Teams embarking on DevOps-Ready IT initiatives must confront multiple issues including:
- Delivering a complete application environment to development teams upon request so they can be immediately productive.
- Providing “as needed” governance and control over resources without negatively impacting developer productivity.
- Adopting concepts such as continuous delivery and continuous integration that automate more of the development process than just resource provisioning.
DevOps teams can use vRealize Suite along with vRealize Code Stream to build a private or hybrid cloud that increases developer productivity. With vRealize, DevOps teams can:
- Rapidly provision a complete application stack within a private or hybrid cloud.
- Provide both self-service and an API approach to support developer choice in how resources are accessed.
- Deliver a solution for continuous delivery that seamlessly integrates with VMware’s CMP for resource provisioning.
Choice Hotels was looking for a solution that would help them speed up the delivery of infrastructure and application resources to their development teams. They were also looking for a solution to help them more easily troubleshoot performance issues in their environments. They found both working with VMware. Using vRealize Suite, a key part of the Software Defined Data Center, the team was able to reduce the time it took to provision an application from six weeks to under 30 minutes while also reducing IT operating costs by being able to resolve performance issues before they cause downtime. You can learn more about how Choice Hotels sped up application delivery here.
Three Use Cases; Three Editions of vRealize Suite
vRealize Suite comes in three editions matched to the use cases I just walked through. The graphic above highlights how vRealize Suite Editions map to the specific use cases called out above. It also shows how vRealize Suite editions are aligned within VMware vCloud Suite which is a bundle that brings together vRealize CMP capabilities with vSphere Enterprise Plus.
Learn more
To learn more about VMware Cloud Management Platform solutions, visit us online at VMware vRealize Suite and vCloud Suite. See how you can jump start your App and Infrastructure Delivery Automation initiative or Streamlined and Automated Data Center Operation initiative with VMware.
