Today’s the day many of us have been waiting for – the GA release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.7 and it is impressive in both feature and scope. You have probably read some of the blogs about this release already but in this blog post we will cover as many of the goodies and updates in 6.7 as we can. So, grab a fresh cup of whatever and buckle up for self-driving operations!
New Intelligent Capacity Analytics
While the legendary capacity engine in vRealize Operations has served customers well for many years, it was finally time for an update. This was a huge ask of our engineering staff and they really came through. Let’s start by understanding what is under the hood and how it brings self-driving operations to your SDDC.
The new capacity analytics engine is smarter and faster, delivering updated forecasts every 5 minutes and projections 1 year into the future. This means that you get value from vRealize Operations on day one. In fact, customers upgrading from previous versions of 6.x will be able to harvest 3 months of history to make the analysis and forecasting even more accurate.
Now you will see historical and predicted demand for CPU, memory and storage on easy to read graphs.
This shows not only the prediction but a confidence boundary that shows both an aggressive and a conservative estimate of growth in a single view. The new capacity analytics provides the brains behind self-driving for optimizing performance and capacity all while giving you the control you need
Continuous Performance Optimization
You need to assure application performance, but you must also abide by operational and business intent. With predictive analytics, vRealize Operations 6.7 can automatically take actions to balance workload and proactively avoid contention. How does this work?
A cornerstone component of this hands-free operation is workload optimization which moves workloads between clusters ensuring they are always getting the resources they need. Workload optimization considers your business and operational intents of your datacenters before making any moves.
Are you looking to drive better performance of your business-critical applications by balancing the clusters? Or do you need to keep the cost per VM as low as possible by consolidating workloads onto as few clusters as possible, the consolidation and densification use case? Do you have SLAs you need to meet? Or license compliance concerns? All of these can be met with vRealize Operations.
What’s Your Intent?
It’s not good enough to just move workloads around to balance them. In fact, that can be harmful if lower priority workloads are moved into clusters or hosts that are serving critical VMs. This is why vRealize Operations 6.7 lets you define your business and operational intent in policy.
- Do you prefer to balance your workloads or consolidate (densification) them onto fewer hosts?
- How much risk is acceptable? What headroom would you like for unplanned or burst demands?
- How can you meet specific business requirements for SLA tiers, license policies, compliance and availability?
All of this is controlled by you. Including Tag Based VM Placement, which allows you to set criteria for VM placement based on vSphere tags.
Operate Like a Cloud Provider
Cloud computing offers consumers seemingly unlimited resources – but we all know that AWS doesn’t have unlimited CPU, Memory and storage. And of course, neither do you! But the trick is having accurate and meaningful information about your capacity. You need to quickly understand where you are having capacity shortfalls, how you can address those shortfalls, what your capacity costs are and quickly plan for new consumer demand… just like a cloud provider.
With vRealize Operations 6.7 that, and more, is available at the click of your mouse. The capacity analytics gives you real-time data on how your capacity is being used and the ability to predict into the future with confidence.
Every five minutes, the capacity analytics is updating forecast models based on resource demand. By the way, this include in-guest memory statistics for accuracy in meeting application needs.
Need more capacity? You can easily find available resources, reclaim them, consolidate and reduce cost. In fact, you can also plan for the future and decide for yourself if workloads are better off in the Public Cloud or in your datacenter (Private Cloud).
Quick Start
A new home page has been crafted to simplify your experience and guide you to the results you need. The Quick Start page provides all the information you need to begin using vRealize Operations 6.7, broken down into simple use cases.
Optimize Performance: A mentioned above this is all about Continuous Optimization leveraging Workload Optimization use cases (Balancing, Consolidation & Densification, SLA and License compliance). This also provides a recommendations page that I often refer to as “a to do list”. This is where I go to get recommendations by vRealize Operations at many of the object types.
Optimize Capacity: Everything Capacity and of course the newly integrated Private Cloud Costing. These go hand in hand. View overall Capacity, view cost savings opportunities as a result of capacity reclamation opportunities. Plan for future growth leveraging “What-If” scenarios to add workloads, and perform Public Cloud comparison. Also assess the overall costs of the Private Cloud, and the cost of the clusters, Datastores, and so much more.
Troubleshoot: The heart and soul of troubleshooting both structured and unstructured data. Address and resolve issues by leveraging actionable alerts, and integrated Log Analytics, as well as workflow-driven dashboards for objects types such as VMs, Hosts, Clusters, Datastores, and the natively integrated vSAN.
Manage Configuration and Compliance: Here you can make sure your vSphere environment is secure and meets the requirements of the vSphere Security Configuration Guides. Get a list of all the non-compliant symptoms and address these issues. And for organizations that have the need to meet PCI-DSS and HIPAA regulatory compliance requirements, well vRealize Operations can also help with that! Spot inconsistencies and unapproved changes in the vSphere environment leveraging purpose build dashboards for vSphere objects like VMs, Hosts, Clusters, and Virtual Distributed Switches. Take control of your vSphere security posture!
Other user interface enhancements include bringing back the dark theme, updates to several widgets, in-context metric definitions, setting default dashboards and so much more.
You can also view several other videos for vRealize Operations 6.7 on our new website VMware vRealize Suite Technical Guides which is focused on technical resources you can use to get the most out of your vRealize Operations experience.
Summary
vRealize Operations 6.7 has made some incredible improvements inspired by many of you who continue to challenge VMware and the Cloud Management Business Unit to do better! Thank you! The new features and capabilities discussed here are just scratching the surface of what vRealize Operations and vRealize Suite can help you accomplish.
Download and Try vRealize Operations here!
