Our vRealize Management customers who use VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) are enjoying the benefit of a fully automated SDDC based on the platform they know and trust. This gives them the ability to embrace hybrid cloud from VMware which allows for consistent management and workload mobility from on-prem to VCF-based clouds. With VCF, the IT group becomes a provider of resources that are ready to be consumed by the rest of the organization. And this is where vRealize Management completes the cloud story. To see how this works, view the demo “How VMware vRealize Suite Delivers Consistent Operations with VMware Cloud Foundation”.
vRealize offers end-to-end provisioning, managing, monitoring, and updating of workloads running in your VCF SDDC. Let’s break this down and talk about how the integrated experience in the demo works.
The Symphony of Consistent IT Operations with vRealize Management
vRealize Management consists of integrated products that work together to provide the benefits above. Like members of an orchestra, each product plays a key role with unique and complementary capabilities that are powerful alone but increase the experience dramatically when working in concert. (Add available on-prem or SaaS here or at the end. I think it fits better at the end but your call.)
Leveraging the workload domains you created with VCF, vRealize Automation provides governance and policy to determine how those workload domains get used by applications deployed through a service catalog for consumers of your SDDC. Application blueprints define not only the configuration of the virtual machines deployed but also any additional network services based on NSX-T capabilities such as firewalls and load balancers created on-demand. Think of vRealize Automation as a VCF but for your users!
Of course, deploying an application is only the first step. During the life of an application, requirements can change, usage patterns will shift, and capacity consumption may increase beyond original plans. This is where vRealize Operations, with its powerful Machine Learning analytics, can provide visibility to those changes, allowing you to react proactively and automatically to maintain performance while keeping your SDDC optimized for capacity and cost. Together with log and event analytics with vRealize Log Insight, you have a wealth of information on performance and health of the entire stack.
And, when it comes to troubleshooting and monitoring, you need to be able to do that with application awareness. Without this, you are working in the dark and cannot ensure that actions taken in the SDDC do not adversely impact your users – the application owners. Likewise, you can validate that application problems are not caused by underlying infrastructure issues. In fact, vRealize Automation provides performance metrics for KPIs from vRealize Operations and presents them to the application owners, so they can confirm for themselves if they are getting the resources they need.
Speaking of cost; this has long been a challenge for IT to manage or even understand. With vRealize Management you not only understand cost from the perspective of a provider of IT resources, you also get to show your consumers what their share of that IT cost is, so that they can understand why you may be inquiring about reclaiming unused resources.
vRealize Network Insight is also part of the orchestra. Your VCF SDDC relies on NSX-T to provide software defined networking services. To manage these services effectively, you will want to use vRealize Network Insight to understand network flows between your applications and identify opportunities to secure your networks with east-west microsegmentation. vRealize Operations also integrates with vRealize Network Insight so that you can see network-related events in a single UI, along with logs from vRealize Log Insight.
See for Yourself
Does all this sound too good to be true? If so, please view our demo “How VMware vRealize Suite Delivers Consistent Operations with VMware Cloud Foundation” to see for yourself why building a hybrid cloud with VCF includes vRealize Management.
To get started, vRealize Management is available as a suite of products, known as VMware vRealize Suite. By the way, vRealize Management products are also available as a service in VMware Cloud.
