vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager – Simplified Management for Your vRealize Investment

Are you looking to quickly install and configure a brand new vRealize deployment or upgrade an existing vRealize environment; both with just a few clicks? Do you want to ensure all of your data center environments are running the same vRealize configuration? Do you want get a single pane of glass to view and manage the vRealize suite through its lifecycle? If so read on!

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) automates Day 0 to Day 2 operations of the entire vRealize Suite, enabling simplified operational experience for customers. The vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager automates install, configuration, upgrade, patch, configuration management, drift remediation and health from within a single pane of glass, thereby freeing IT Managers/Cloud admin resources to focus on business-critical initiatives, while improving time to value (TTV), reliability and consistency.

Until now, customers have had to manage the installation and upkeep of the vRealize product portfolio by managing each of the individual product components separately. vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager unifies all of the suite management tasks into a single console. This enhances the manageability of the suite and reduces the ongoing work required by cloud admins. Additionally it significantly reduces inputs and interactions on the aprt of the administrator, while the automation ensures error free repeatability.

Today, we are pleased to announce the General Availability of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.0. It is a standard part of the vRealize Suite and it is included with your vRealize Suite license.

Simplified Installation and Upgrade

vRSLCM simplifies and automates the installation of the complete vRealize Suite. Customers have the option to leverage either product based or solution based deployment models. Customers can also easily import their existing environment allowing it to be managed via vRSLCM and additionally with a single click can upgrade existing product to the latest product release.

The installation or upgrade includes pre-checks and validation across the SDDC stack including compatibility, environment and entitlement checks. Installation into development, test and production environments and across all of your data centers can be completely managed by a single vRSLCM instance. vRSLCM will reduce the installation time of the vRealize Suite from days to hours.

Customers can also export the entire configuration of their environment into a JSON template (infrastructure-as-code) and leverage the template to easily replicate new environment.

If GUIs aren’t your thing, then there is an API for all of the capabilities and supported use cases. This enables complete scripting control of the installation or upgrade process.

Stop Worrying about Configuration Drift

Configuration drift across environments is a thing of the past! Using vRSLCM, customers can now do configuration management for the vRealize Suite including drift reporting against “golden” baseline configurations. Cloud administrators can push configuration changes to all of their environments and track what’s changed over time, all from the vRSLCM console. Additionally tracking issues and triaging problems is simplified with unified logs.

Get Peace of Mind!

With vRSLCM, customers can easily monitor the health of vRealize Suite deployment across data centers and dev/test/production environments. By leveraging and integrating with vRealize Operations SDDC Health, customers will be alerted when problems arise, so to quickly diagnose and troubleshoot the issue.

In addition, customers get the added benefit of deploying recommended reference architecture and VMware Validated Designs (VVD). These validated designs help ensure that the deployment is optimized for scale, performance, and ultimately reduce future headaches in managing the vRealize Suite.

Instant Benefit from Day Zero and Beyond

Our vRealize customers can get instant benefits from vRSLCM, starting from Day Zero – initial deployment. To quantify the value of vRSLCM, VMware Validated Designs team performed a before-and-after test for the VVD-based vRealize Suite installation and the results revealed how vRSLCM achieves faster time-to-value and a better user experience for customers.

50% reduction in Context Switch: vRSLCM reduces context switches by integrating key processes into one place, and all configuration parameters into a single UI. For example, with vRSLCM, pre-check and validation become much simpler. Customers can perform certification generation, get automated entitlement check and SDDC compatibility check without jumping back and forth across different platforms and tools as they had to do previously.

55% Reduction in User Inputs: vRSLCM provides pre-defined deployment configuration with different sizing options. Instead of manual input of lengthy and error-prone environment parameters, customer can simply choose from standardized sizing lists but still have the flexibility to customize settings. Additionally, vRSLCM incorporates solution-based installation, defined by VMware validated design, which ensures the best practice to address customers’ specific business outcomes.

65% Reduction in User Interaction Time: To deliver “one-click” experience, vRSLCM streamlines and simplifies the installation process, provides clear guidance to collect all user inputs upfront and minimizes the attended processes from the automation.

The improvements mentioned above contribute to an overall 65% reduction in time to deploy VVD-based vRealize Suite! But there are other benefits which have not been captured by the numbers, such as easy resume and retry for faster failure recovery, simplified vIDM integration for Single Sign-on, export/import configuration capabilities for easy environment replication, and a lot more.