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3 Business Outcomes of How vRealize 8.3 Manages Clouds

Today we are pleased to announce new innovations across our VMware vRealize Cloud Management portfolio of on-premises and SaaS solutions in our 8.3 release, which can better optimize, protect, and modernize your hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. We built on the 8.2 release and refreshed the capabilities for your most important use cases so you’re able to modernize IT, accelerate cloud evolution, and assure developer productivity.

With an environment built on VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware Cloud on AWS, vRealize Cloud Management gives you consistent infrastructure with consistent operations from the data center, to the cloud, to the edge. You get a common operating model that helps simplify the complexity of managing a cloud environment resulting in better agility as you progress through your digital transformation journey. It doesn’t matter where in that journey you start, vRealize Cloud Management can help from wherever you are now.

3 Measurable Business Outcomes

Wherever you start on your journey, the business outcomes that organizations can achieve are measurable. VMware commissioned Forrester to research customers, who said they experienced productivity gains, cost savings, and business acceleration, including the following:

 

Key Capabilities

If you, too, want to maximize efficiency and experience similar measurable outcomes or you’re just starting with vRealize 8.3, here are the products with refreshed capabilities in this release:

  • vRealize Automation 8.3 and vRealize Automation Cloud
  • vRealize Operations 8.3 and vRealize Operations Cloud
  • vRealize AI Cloud
  • vRealize True Visibility Suite
  • vRealize Log Insight 8.3 and vRealize Log Insight Cloud
  • vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.3
  • vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and vRealize Network Insight Cloud


vRealize Automation 8.3 and vRealize Automation Cloud

vRealize Automation 8.3 and vRealize Automation Cloud delivers enhanced solutions for customers’ most critical automation use cases, including self-service multi-clouds, network automation, DevOps with actionable insights, greater security, and improved performance. New vRealize Automation capabilities include:

  • Integrated configuration management: Out-of-the-box software configuration management built to automate tasks across their on-prem, cloud, or hybrid environments. This release integrates SaltStack Config as a native offering in the vRealize Automation Console and enables customers to automate and simplify deployments from vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.
  • Property Groups: The ability to create, update, read and delete property groups with predefined data. This helps customers work more efficiently by reusing groups of properties, tracking resource usage and storing metadata. vRealize Automation makes the VMware Cloud Templates development more powerful and dynamic by reusing these attributes and keeping them up to date.
  • Security Properties: The ability to create a secure variable in Cloud Assembly and apply it to a cloud template or ABX action. This enables customers to better secure sensitive data in encrypted form and introduces a new method to produce secure variables for project and consumption.
  • NSX-V to NSX-T migration: This release now supports NSX-V to NSX-T migration enabling customers to benefit from multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud networking, declarative APIs for full stack automation, built-in distributed security, advanced threat protection with intrusion detection and prevention, network threat analysis, unified networking and security for cloud native applications, and consistent policy and streamlined operations across deployments.
  • vRealize Automation SaltStackSecOps now available: This new component of vRealize Automation delivers full-service, closed-loop automation for IT system compliance and vulnerability remediation.  

Additionally, this new release delivers improved performance, deployment speed, increased efficiency and helps complete tasks quicker. This includes reducing the time it takes to deploy a virtual machine — a 2x improvement from vRealize Automation 8.2. (1) The new release also enables customers to distribute a deployment across cloud zones via enhancements in placement logic.

 

vRealize Operations 8.3 and vRealize Operations Cloud

vRealize Operations 8.3 and vRealize Operations Cloud offer improved security for AI-powered operations in both on-premises and SaaS deployments, including the features listed below. For a deeper dive into the new capabilities, read the announcement blog.

  • Data Security Standards: VMware vRealize Operations 8.3 modules meet Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 and follow the Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for U.S. Federal data security requirements.
  • VMware Cloud Configuration Maximums: Provides customers with better visibility into their VMware Cloud limits and their consumption relative to those limits.
  • Geo-Expansion: Europe (Frankfurt) in addition to US-West (Oregon) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) 
  • Cloud Management Assessment for VMC: Native out-of-the-box VMC specific dashboards to help with cloud sizing, assessments, pilot, and Day 2 operations for workload migrations  

 

vRealize AI Cloud  

vRealize AI Cloud, included with vRealize Operations Cloud in the vRealize Cloud Universal subscription, introduces machine learning techniques to self-tune VMware infrastructure operations.  Through data collections and reinforcement learning, this service will continuously optimize performance of VMware vSAN clusters while factoring in the dynamic nature of traditional and modern applications. 

With the upcoming release, we are making it easier for vRealize Cloud Universal customers to adopt vRealize AI Cloud. It will be available with its own standalone user-interface for customers that have not onboarded or migrated to vRealize Operations Cloud.  For more details and information, check out the announcement blog. 

 

vRealize True Visibility Suite 

vRealize True Visibility Suite adds extensibility to vRealize Operations by expanding the industry leading management platform to physical servers, storage, network, applications and databases. With more than 50 agent-less management packs bringing increased data depth and context, troubleshooting has never been easier. 

In our release we are adding exciting new functionality to the ServiceNow Management Pack for vRealize Operations. The new release will add CMDB population, which creates an easy process to translate vRealize Operations resources like Hosts and VMs and the relationships between them to configuration items in the ServiceNow CMDB. 

 

vRealize Log Insight 8.3 and vRealize Log Insight Cloud

In tandem with vRealize Operations 8.3, vRealize Log Insight 8.3 modules provide data security standards to meet Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 and follow the Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for U.S. Federal data security requirements.

vRealize Log Insight Cloud introduces enhanced ML analytics for errors and Knowledge Base (KB) correlation, ERI-FIPS compliance, VMware HCX and VMware Site Recovery Manager log integration, and native data archiving support. For a deeper dive on the release, read our detailed announcement blog.

  • Geo-Expansion: Europe (Frankfurt) in addition to US-West (Oregon) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) 
  • Big Data Alert Management: Machine Learning analytics, anomalies, insights for log errors and KB correlation 

 

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.3

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.3 delivers a comprehensive application lifecycle and content management solution for vRealize Suite, accelerating time to value, minimizing ongoing management, and improving end user productivity. The new capabilities in the 8.3 release are listed below, and read our blog to learn more about how vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager helps you migrate vRealize Automation from 7.5/7.6 to 8.3.

  • Lifecycle operations – Deploy vRealize Automation SaltStack Config for vRealize Automation customers either for a single org or multi-tenancy. Support the scale up of vRealize Automation to extra-large nodes for enhanced processing and memory with 34 vCPU and 96 GB RAM. This is great for larger customers needing more CPUs and memory to accommodate additional vRealize Automation components.

  • Identity management – Supports new VMware Identity Manager 3.3.4 deployments, which includes critical vulnerability patches, as well as upgrades from 3.3.2 to 3.3.4.

  • Content management – Add vRealize Automation Cloud as a content endpoint in vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager content management. This means customers can share vRealize Automation contents from on-premises to vRealize Automation Cloud.
  • Platform updates – Support ERI certification and follow the Security Technology Implementation Guide (STIG) requirements and Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT).

 

vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and vRealize Network Insight Cloud 

VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and vRealize Network Insight Cloud make it easier to plan, build, run, and manage complex networks. This new release includes the capabilities listed below, and for deeper context read our “what’s new in 6.1” blog.

  • Customization: Enhancements to Pinboards for users to customize persistent dashboards to preserve widget filter state at the time of pinning, the ability to see other’s pinboards in the Auditor role, as well as new abilities to allow users to pin no result pins

  • Multi-Cloud: VMware Cloud on AWS edge router interface statistics for improved network troubleshooting

  • NSX-T Integrations: Data from NSX Intelligence can now be integrated for more application-centric network operations and troubleshooting visibility
  • VMware SD-WAN: New analytics intent for better service level agreement (SLA) monitoring and visibility with SD-WAN link utilization and metering

  • Assurance and Verification: Enhancements to vRealize Network Insight Assurance and Verification including in context device configuration snapshots viewable from the topology map, improved search for alerts, more 3rd party device support, and easier troubleshooting

 

Summary

We hope you dive further into each product blog to see how vRealize 8.3 can better optimize, protect, and modernize your hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. With vRealize Cloud Management, you’ll be well prepared to take on increasing responsibilities while maximizing ROI on existing and new IT investments. Moreover, as you may be expected to do more, you will confidently be able to extend your purview to offer a new, modern platform to your developers.

As recent events have shown, cloud truly delivers. It’s time to make cloud your business, with an intelligent cloud management from VMware that solves challenges while spotlighting the immense capabilities of your infrastructure and operations team.

 

More Resources

Read more about vRealize in these items below, try one of our solutions, and follow the conversation on Twitter @vmwarecloudmgmt.

 

 

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Ellie Ruano

Ellie Ruano is a member of the VMware Cloud Management team and her responsibility spans across the vRealize and CloudHealth portfolio. Throughout her career she has been passionate about helping…

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