Today, VMware announced the upcoming release of vRealize Operations 7.0, which will help customers derive even more value from a “Self-Driving” approach to operations management.
The Self-Driving vision is to automate and simplify operations management by delivering per the “Three Tenets” of Self-Driving Operations.
- Intent-Driven Continuous Performance Optimization
- Efficient Capacity Management
- Intelligent Remediation
What’s New in vRealize Operations 7.0
As you will recall, we introduced self-driving operations in March this year, with the release of vRealize Operations 6.7. Self-driving summarizes the strategy and vision to provide continuous and automated closed loop performance and capacity optimization at minimal cost that is based on business and operational intent. Think about it, as a customer all you need to do is define operational and business intent, and let the platform take care of the rest to assure performance, densify clusters or enforce software license separation. Once intent is defined, the platform continuously verifies workload performance against defined intent, applying predictive analytics to project future requirements, and automatically takes actions to balance workloads and right-size VMs to optimize performance and capacity.
The upcoming vRealize Operations 7.0 will augment the capabilities introduced in the last release, particularly focusing on:
- Business intent-driven continuous performance optimization with new automated workload balancing capabilities, enhanced integration with vRealize Automation for both initial placement and on-going workload balancing, new host-based placement feature, and workload right-sizing workflows
- Efficient capacity management by enhancing the real-time, predictive capacity & cost analytics engine and adding multiple what-if planning scenarios
- Multi-cloud support with migration planning across VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS, as well as updated management packs for AWS and Kubernetes
- Quick time to value with updates to the UI, simplified custom dashboard creation and sharing, enhanced SDDC integrations and built-in vSphere config & compliance
Learn more at VMworld: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2018/08/vmworld-las-vegas-recommended-self-driving-operations-sessions.html
Let’s double click into some of these capabilities.
Closed Loop Performance Optimization
With the upcoming vRealize Operations 7.0 release, VMware will enhance the integration between vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation to deliver closed loop performance optimization. Deep integration between vRealize Operations 7.0 and vRealize Automation 7.5 will enable full Cloud Management Platform (CMP) integration for initial and ongoing placement of workloads across clusters based on operational and business intent (e.g., utilization, compliance, license cost)
vRealize Automation can already take advantage of the analytics and intent from vRealize Operations for best initial placement of workloads, provisioning new deployments based on available capacity and usage trends. Now let’s say some time passes and either vRealize Operations finds an opportunity to optimize performance or a datacenter goes red, indicating resource imbalance. vRealize Operations will honor the reservation policies for placement and balancing and only migrate virtual machines between clusters which are part of the same reservation.
Key Highlights of vRealize Operations 7.0
- Enhanced User Interface
The new release will make vRealize Operations even simpler to use, featuring an updated use case and persona-based ‘Quick Start’ dashboard.
- Automating Performance Based on Business and Operational Intent
In the previous release of vRealize Operations 6.7, we introduced performance optimization based on intent. In this release of vRealize Operations 7.0, we are enhancing this capability by introducing the Automate button. When the Automate button is selected, vRealize Operations will automatically search for optimization opportunities and execute accordingly. Customers will still have the options to trigger optimization actions immediately and manually or schedule it to occur in a convenient maintenance window.
- Automated Host Based Placement, Driven by Business Intent
This new capability will provide customers a way to automate Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) based on business intent. Typically, vRealize Operations balances workloads across clusters and DRS resolves contention within the cluster. Now, you will be able to teach DRS your business intent and control not only balancing across clusters, but also which host within a cluster the workload will land on. This can be used for license separation, compliance, tiering and more. For example, if you have two clusters in a datacenter or custom datacenter, you will be able to specify which hosts are for Windows workloads, Linux, or MySQL and vRealize Operations will balance workloads across these clusters while ensuring that Windows workloads land on Windows hosts, Linux on Linux hosts … you get the picture. You will also be able use this capability to fix tag violations and even segment a single giant cluster and manage license separation.
- Capacity Analytics Enhanced with Exponential Decay and Calendar Awareness
The new capacity analytics engine delivered in vRealize Operations 6.7 was groundbreaking. We’ve continued to build from that momentum in vRealize Operations 7.0 with additional enhancements, particularly with Exponential Decay and Calendar Awareness.
Delivered in vROps 6.7
- Real-Time Predictive Capacity Analytics, based on industry-standard ARIMA statistical analysis model
- Improved capacity accuracy; including for Workload Optimization (aka Workload Balancing)
- Self-learning, updated in real-time; calculations available immediately
- Integrated costing with capacity
What’s New in vROps 7.0
- Exponential decay to give more relevance to changing patterns and react better to more recent spikes without losing periodicity
- Improved calendar aware periodicity to detect, the nth day of the month, the end of the month, and the first day of the month
- Plan Capacity across Private Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS
The What-If Analysis feature from vRealize Operations 7.0 can potentially help make room for new applications, procure hardware or migrate workloads to the cloud. The new release will offer three what-if scenarios to:
- Workload Planning to figure out the best fit for these new VMs
- Physical Infrastructure Planning to model hardware purchases with CapEx visibility
- Migration Planning helps plan cloud migration to VMware Cloud on AWS or AWS natively with detailed drill downs into costs and capacity requirements and recommendations
- Simplified Dashboard Creation and Sharing
In vRealize Operations 7.0, we’ve simplified the dashboard creation process, adding an intuitive canvas and multiple out of the box widgets to improve the user experience. Dashboard sharing and embedding will also become easier using smart links without requiring login, improving the cross-team collaboration and reporting for users.
- vRealize Operations AWS Management Pack Update
Leveraging the updated AWS management pack, you will be able to manage your AWS inventory across regions and accounts and check the availability of AWS services, with 28 new dashboards, summary pages and 34 new alerts. You will also be able to reclaim unused AWS resources and get recommendations on EC2 instance types. You will have support for 24 AWS services, including EC2, RDS, EBS, LB, Lambda, Redshift, etc.
- Other Miscellaneous Enhancements
- Workload Right-sizing to avoid performance bottlenecks and reclaim over-allocated resources
- Built-in vSphere config & compliance: PCI, HIPAA, DISA, FISMA, ISO, CIS
- Ability to extend to the entire data center and cloud with updated management packs for Storage, vRO, Kubernetes, Federation etc.
- vSAN performance, capacity, and troubleshooting including support for stretched clusters and through vRealize Operations plug-in in vCenter
- Wavefront integration for application operation
- .. And More!
These are just some of the highlights of the new release. Stay tuned for General Availability announcement.
For more information, take the guided tour: https://www.vmware.com/go/vrealize-guides
Visit the vRealize Operations home page: https://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-operations.html
