vRealize Operations 8.1 is now Generally Available (GA). Please read the GA blog by Brandon Gordon
Today we are very excited to announce the upcoming release of VMware vRealize Operations 8.1, which is part of today’s announcement about VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 and VMware vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes, to support modernizing infrastructure and applications. vRealize Operations 8.1 will deliver new and enhanced capabilities for self-driving operations to help customers optimize, plan and scale VMware Cloud, whether on-premises private cloud or VMware SDDC in multiple public clouds such as VMware Cloud on AWS, while at the same time unifying multi-cloud monitoring. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), this release will provide a unified operations platform, delivering continuous performance optimization, efficient capacity and cost management, proactive planning, app-aware intelligent remediation and integrated compliance.
As you may remember, vRealize Operations 6.7, 7.0 and 7.5 focused on the application of predictive data analytics and artificial intelligence to performance and capacity management. vRealize Operations 8.0 built on these capabilities and enhanced performance and capacity management for VMware Cloud, while introducing a “troubleshooting workbench” for accelerated root-cause analysis, anomaly detection and unified visibility across VMware Cloud and native public clouds.
The key themes for vRealize Operations 8.1 release include:
- Managing Containers on vSphere 7.0 as well as enhancing container management pack
- Natively managing VMware Cloud on AWS
- Supporting Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Ease of use improvements across the board
- Integrations across the vRealize family of products, including vRealize Automation, vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Network Insight
All the capabilities of vRealize Operations 8.1 will also be available as a VMware Cloud Service, vRealize Operations Cloud at initial availability.
Here is a quick list of all the new capabilities that will be available across the 4 tenets of self-driving operations as well as platform enhancements.
- Continuous Performance Optimization
- Integration between vRealize Automation Cloud and vRealize Operations Cloud
- Efficient capacity and cost management
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- Rate card based pricing for vRealize Automation 8.1 managed VMs
- Enhanced public cloud costing via CloudHealth including Perspectives
- Improved VMware Cloud on AWS migration assessment
- Support for vVols
- App-aware intelligent remediation
- Full support for vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes
- Native support for VMware Cloud on AWS including NSX-T support and new dashboards
- Support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in addition to AWS and Azure
- Integration between vRealize Operations Cloud and vRealize Log Insight Cloud
- Network-aware troubleshooting with integration with vRealize Network Insight
- Integration with Slack
- Physical OS Monitoring (vRealize Operations Cloud)
- Management Packs: New VxRail and enhanced AWS, SDDC, SNMP
- Integrated Compliance
- Refresh compliance pack content for DISA and CIS
- Platform Enhancements
- Ease of Use: Simplified alert creation, dashboard management, consistent navigation and new summary pages
- Voluntary Product Accessibility Testing (VPAT) across new workflows
Since, that is a lot to cover in a single blog, I am going to double click into the top three uses cases and new capabilities and enhancements for these.
- Self-driving operations for vSphere 7 with Kubernetes
vRealize Operations 8.1 will be able to discover and help monitor vSphere with Kubernetes with the ability to auto-discover new constructs of Supervisor Cluster, Namespaces, PODs and Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters as you on-board them in vCenter using Workload Management. It will include net new summary pages to monitor the performance, capacity, utilization and configuration of the Kubernetes on vSphere 7.0. Capacity forecasting will show capacity bottlenecks for pods and supervisor clusters and out of box Dashboards, Reports, Views and Alerts will be available to operationalize Workload Platform with complete visibility and control.
In addition, if developers deceide to deploy a different Kubernetes stack on guest clusters, the Container Management Pack can be used to monitor any other flavor of kubernetes, providing the ability to visualize K8s cluster topology, co-relate virtual infrastructure and K8s infrastrcture as well as provide KPIs, dashboards and alerts.
- Self-driving Operations for VMware Cloud on AWS
vRealize Operations 8.1 will provide native support for VMware Cloud on AWS. It will simplify Cloud Account for VMware Cloud on AWS, leveraging VMware Cloud Service Portal Token and will be able to auto-Discover new SDDCs and incorporate for monitoring in a few simple steps. There will be only one account to manage multiple VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs including vCenter, vSAN, NSX as well as provide full integration with VMware Cloud on AWS billing.
The new release of vRealize Operations will feature a number of new out of the box dashboards for VMware Cloud on AWS. New dashboards can be used to:
- Track usage and performance of management virtual machines including NSX Edges, Controller and vCenter Server.
- Monitor key resources, including CPU, Memory, Disk and Network for infrastructure and workloads.
- Track capacity trends and resultant forecasts to with Time Remaining, Capacity Remaining and Virtual Machines Remaining metrics.
- Find victim and villain VMs based on current and historical usage trend with powerful data transformation functions.
It will also provide full support for NSX-T
In addition, this release will provide full integration of VMware Cloud on AWS costs in vRealize Operations using bills from VMware Cloud Service portal. It will provide the ability to track Outstanding and Year to Date costs as well as provide Cost Breakdown by subscription, on-demand and purchase history.
The VMware Cloud on AWS migration assessment will also be updated to take advantage of this native integration, providing easy to understand analysis of Save scenario for further analysis of the subscription with ability to save multiple scenarios, including: Reserved CPU, Reserved Memory, Fault Tolerance, Raid Level and Discounts
- Unified Multicloud monitoring
The vRealize Operations 8.1 will enhance multicloud monitoring by adding support for Google Cloud Platform, updating AWS support and enhancing the Cloud Health Management pack.
vRealize Operations 8.1 will provide monitoring for the following GCP services:
- Compute Engine Instance
- Storage Bucket
- Cloud VPN
- Big Query
- Kubernetes Engine
The AWS Management Pack will be updated to support new AWS Objects such as:
- EFS
- Elastic Beanstalk
- Direct Connect Gateway
- Target Group
- Transit Gateway
- Internet Gateway
- Elastic Network Interface (ENI)
- EKS Cluster
In addition, the CloudHealth Management Pack will be enhanced to include the ability to pull in “perspectives” and GCP costing information into vRealize Operations 8.1. And you know that once metrics and data are in vRealize Operations, you can create any number of custom dashboards combining private, hybrid and public cloud costs.
There you have it folks, a quick snapshot of the top three new use cases and associated capabilities and enhancements.
Getting started has never been easier: Contact a sales team member today, download a free trial for the on-premises vRealize Operations or take advantage of 30-day free trial for vRealize Operations Cloud.
Stay tuned for General Availability (GA) announcement!
