We’re excited to announce support for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and VMware Cloud on AWS with new innovations across the VMware vRealize Cloud Management portfolio in our 8.4 release. The new capabilities and enhancements in the on-premises and SaaS offerings address flexibility and choice for our customers, helping them manage, optimize, and automate their VMware Cloud and native public cloud services, supporting their multi-cloud environment.
The capabilities in the vRealize 8.4 release include the following:
- vRealize Cloud Universal
- vRealize Suite & vCloud Suite
- vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.4
- vRealize Automation Cloud and 8.4
- vRealize Operations Cloud and 8.4
- vRealize Log Insight Cloud and 8.4
- vRealize Network Insight Cloud and 6.2
These capabilities are expected to be available in VMware’s Q1 FY22 (ending April 30, 2021), and here are the highlights of the release.
vRealize Cloud Universal
- Enhanced Unified Self-Service Catalog – In vRealize Cloud Universal customers can use vRealize Cloud Federated Catalog. With this capability, IT teams will deliver infrastructure resources to users globally and on a self-service basis from multiple instances of vRealize Automation, freeing up precious IT time.
- Enhanced Cloud Infrastructure Visibility – vRealize Cloud Federated Analytics offers IT teams at-a-glance visibility across their hybrid and multi-cloud environments, giving them the insights, they need to support effective, ongoing migration to the cloud and eliminate siloes.
- Enhanced Visualization of Cloud Consumption – vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager delivers automated license usage metering from vRealize deployments both in the cloud and on-premises, which is helpful for cost tracking and is integrated with VMware Cloud Services.
vRealize Suite and vCloud Suite
Beginning April 1, 2021, organizations will be able to purchase a new bundle that combines vRealize True Visibility Suite with vRealize Suite or vCloud Suite Standard. The new extensibility bundle will only be available until October 30, 2021 and brings unmatched data depth and context through full stack views that combine virtual infrastructure with physical compute, storage and network. Customers will benefit from:
- Enriched troubleshooting with detailed views of physical and virtual infrastructure.
- Hundreds of comprehensive out-of-the box reports and dashboards for physical compute, storage and networking.
vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.4
- New Deployment of vRealize Automation SaltStack Config – For customers with standalone vRealize Automation Standard+ license, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager will simplify and automate the deployment of all vRealize Automation SaltStack Config components.
- Enhanced VMware Cloud Foundation Integration – Customers will have the opportunity to gain high-availability across clusters because they will be able to deploy vRealize products in different clusters. Plus, they will be able to have support tickets routed faster to the right VMware Cloud Foundation support team with a VMware Cloud Foundation watermark embedded in the log bundle.
- Enhanced VMware Identity Manager Support – For customers who do not need VMware Identity Manager for single sign on (SSO), vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager will remove the previous mandate to deploy this capability for all vRealize products, except vRealize Automation, making it optional.
vRealize Automation Cloud and 8.4
- Enhanced Multi-Public Cloud Provisioning Support: vRealize Automation will deliver enhanced public cloud provisioning support across for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. For Microsoft Azure, this release will include support for existing availability sets, custom images from an Azure image gallery, creating Azure disk snapshots and choosing specific Azure disk encryption sets for different deployments. For Google Cloud, this release will support for sole-tenant provisioning.
- Enhanced vRealize Automation SaltStack Config Integration: Powered by Salt Project, this enhancement feature will provide customers with simplified installation, set-up, and deployment of vRealize Automation SaltStack Config via tighter integration with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.
- New IT vulnerability management and compliance enforcement capabilities: Customers will add compliance and vulnerability management capabilities with vRealize Automation SaltStack SecOps. This new component helps IT and security teams work together to reduce risk and improve business agility via powerful event-driven automation and relevant, up-to-date security content. Teams will be able to define an IT security policy, scan systems against it, detect issues, and actively remediate them—all from a single platform.
- Expanded Network Automation with NSX-T Migration Support: Enhanced vRealize Automation Migration Assistant tool will further help NSX customers to simplify and accelerate migrations from NSX for vSphere (NSX-V) to NSX-T environments.
- New Integrated Self-Service Automation for VMware Cloud on AWS: VMware vRealize Automation Cloud integration with VMware Cloud on AWS will enable VMware Cloud on AWS customers to activate vRealize Automation Cloud with a single click and help automate the setup of the necessary cloud resources. Customers will also be able to use vRealize Automation to automate VMware Cloud on AWS security groups.
- New vRealize Log Insight content pack: By leveraging the new vRealize Log Insight content pack, vRealize Automation customers will monitor operations, health status and the success or failure of different tasks/actions. With this capability, they will be able to enjoy better insights into the different operations of vRealize Automation via various dashboards.
vRealize Operations Cloud and 8.4
- Increased AWS Services Support: For customers who are multi-cloud and would like a consolidated cloud management view, vRealize Operations will dramatically expand coverage of the most popular native AWS services—supporting 57 total services going forward—helping customers further automate and simplify operations of those services.
- New Costing for VMware Cloud on AWS: Customers will be able to calculate the cost of their VMware Cloud on AWS VMs and clusters using their VMware Cloud on AWS bills. This includes running reports and tracking the potential savings of reclamation from powered off VMs, idle VMs, VM snapshots, orphaned disks, and oversized VMs. Customers will also be able to produce a single dashboard spanning VMware Cloud on AWS and on-premises vSphere costs.
- Enhanced Cost Flow Optimization: This release provides a major update for vRealize Operations cost management by providing cost flow guidance to customers that will help improve their cost efficiency. With 10 new dashboards, customers can improve and visualize costs, including return on investment, total cost of ownership, potential cost savings, and more.
- New VMware Cloud on AWS What-if Planning: Customers will be able to predict demand, plan for future capacity needs and get actional insights with new capacity planning capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS. The new features include the ability to assess the capacity utilization trends, understand how soon they will run out with time remaining, and cost impact of adding or removing VMs from an existing VMware Cloud on AWS environment.
- New Support for Open Source Telegraf Agent: vRealize Operations Cloud is expanding the ways customers can monitor their apps by opening the options to pull metrics from any app using any of the open source Telegraf agent plugins or by developing their own. Plus, customers will be able to monitor these apps anywhere—whether they are running in a VMware environment or on bare metal servers.
- New Scheduling Reclamation and Rightsizing: Introducing the ability for customers to schedule reclamation and rightsizing activities, such as deleting old snapshots, powering off or deleting idle VMs, reclaiming wasted resources from VMs, or adding resources to undersized VMs to avoid performance issues. This allows organizations to reduce their business risk, lower costs, strengthen security, and improve sustainability.
- vRealize Operations for Horizon Management Pack: This management pack will be offered to on-premises deployments, and it will be enhanced to offer a new user centric data model providing visibility from the session to user through all levels of infrastructure.
vRealize Log Insight Cloud and 8.4
Cloud Release:
- Knowledge Base Articles Correlated to Logs using Machine Learning to show errors and propose remediation actions.
- Enhanced Multi-Cloud observability across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform logs (in addition to 50+ AWS services).
- New Geo-expansion into Canada (central) in addition to US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (Frankfurt).
8.4 Release:
- Mask Sensitive Data in log messages by matching formats for IP addresses, social security numbers, credit card numbers, etc., or dropping a field altogether.
- Drop Unwanted Logs that are not needed, thus freeing up storage without logs having to age out.
vRealize Network Insight Cloud and 6.2
- Improved Network Visibility for VMware Cloud on AWS: This feature will enable network visibility of intra-SDDC Groups and AWS Transit Connect traffic flows to help customers with their cost analysis to better measure and optimize network performance.
- VMware Cloud: There will be new network visibility for Google Cloud VMware Engine and Azure VMware Solution so users will have more capabilities to correlate application performance across more multi-cloud environments.
- Enhanced Machine Learning Flow-Based Application Discovery: This feature will help IT staff efficiently prepare for migration planning by dynamically grouping VMs, whether in the cloud or on-premises, into application groups, as well as discover application boundaries. This enhancement will be newly available for vRealize Network Insight (on-premises) customers and improved for vRealize Network Insight Cloud (SaaS) customers.
- Enhanced Assurance and Verification: This release will improve usability and scale improvements for business intent validation and enable a more proactive network.
- VMware NSX-T:This release will improve metrics thresholds as well as search query and filtering capabilities for BGP and Equal-cost multi-path (ECMP).
- VMware SD-WAN: There will be improvedvisibility with application heat maps that help pinpoint critical issues for faster troubleshooting resolution.
Summary
If your organization is building a modern hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment, you’ll want a single control pane – a common operating model – that reduces complexity and gives you consistent operations leveraging these new capabilities across your entire environment. You get operational consistency with a familiar tool like vRealize Cloud Management so you can focus on driving business agility.
More Resources
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