Welcome to the first release of vRealize Automation (vRA) Cloud Resource View. This feature is included in the vRA Cloud May release (05.21). I will go through the details of why this feature was created and how it can be beneficial for your Infrastructure-as-a-Service architecture.
Over the years vRA has served all different types of cloud infrastructure – private or hybrid, simple or complex. Consistent feedback we hear is that in addition to the vRA deployment construct, our users want more manageability of the individual resources. We took time and listened. Among the many user personas for Infrastructure-as-Code, the cloud end users, the developers, and cloud administrator need direct access to resources.
What is Resource View?
In short, Resource View is another angle on managing resources and workloads in vRA. You may already be familiar with the concept of deployments: resource groups that group resource together. Instead of managing resources by resource groups, we now offer an option to manage resources directly.
Next to the deployment tab, there is “Resources” tab to direct to Resource View.
How can Resource View be helpful for me?
We found that every user has his/her own way to navigate through the provisioned/onboarded/discovered resources and deployments. Resource view will help visibility, monitoring, and allow easy day 2 action accessibility especially in these use cases:
- cloud administrators with primarily single virtual machine deployments
- cloud end users who need to use and manage resources
The reason is simple: if there is primarily only a single virtual machine in deployments (aka, our resource group), then the benefit of grouping the resource doesn’t really help here. It’s easier to navigate through the individual resources directly. Deployment is more useful when there are multiple resources. We also found out our users leverage deployment construct by departments and business groups – meaning the concept fits more with cloud administrator’s responsibilities. When it comes to the cloud end user, it’s more important for those users to perform day 2 actions efficiently and open remote consoles without guessing.
What features are included in this Resource View release?
This is our first phase of the Resource View functionality, many features are introduced. Users can switch between an “All Resources view”, “Machine View”, “Network View” and ” Storage View”. Users can also mix-and-match different sub types (e.g. AWS machines + vSphere disks).
Because each category of resource (machine/network/storage) has its own special key factors, we created views tailored to these resources. You can also continue to access day 2 action lists by the tab button to the left of the resource name.
We also included a few filters for Resource View.
We have new APIs for resource centric management as well, coming soon in vRA cloud release enabling resource actions and requests.
What’s next?
Throughout the time we spent researching resource centric management, we found use causes for this initiative across different roles with various architectures. This will help first-timers to vRA looking for either deployment constructs or direct resource manageability. We are continuously working on the next generation of resource revolution. We hope this new functionality enables admins and first-timers to be more effective in their day to day cloud management activities.
This is everything I ever wanted and more.
– Design Partner Program customer.
For everything vRA, deployment & resources, cloud templates and catalog, please post comments and questions below.
