Today we are excited to announce the tech preview of a transformational capability to the VMware vRealize Cloud Management portfolio. Project Ensemble will simplify and accelerate your journey to multi-cloud by uniting the different personas in an application-centric collaborative user interface. Project Ensemble will unify and strengthen our best-in-class multi-cloud management capabilities and support a cloud operating model for customers at any stage of their cloud transformation.
Why Project Ensemble?
The cloud era introduces boundless possibilities for businesses and organizations to innovate and scale faster than ever before. However, it seems that the trade-off is increasing complexity for operations, loss of control, and runaway costs, but that does not have to be the case. Many infrastructure and operations teams are adopting a cloud operating model to help transform how multi-clouds are managed by becoming service providers and brokers of cloud services.
A cloud operating model combines people, process and technology and provides an operational framework for key decisions on where your applications need to live, how to help them perform and be more secure, and how to optimize the efficiency of these environments and your overall cloud budget. This model allows for more easily adopting new clouds and managing existing clouds with the same staff, tools, and governance policies. vRealize Cloud Management supports the cloud operating model and support private, public, multi-, hybrid and edge clouds in any combination.
Still, our customers are looking for ways to further streamline multi-cloud operations, provide app-centric self-service and predictive support to deal with data growth and complexity. They also want to increase automation and predictively support applications. What is needed is a new way to consume clouds in a cohesive and simplified way.
Project Ensemble Goals and Vision
Consider all the rich, powerful capabilities of vRealize Cloud services, including self-service for cloud consumption with day-2 automation, application discovery, monitoring, troubleshooting, capacity analysis, configuration changes, cost visibility, and more.
Now, what if you could see all of those in a simple, meaningful way?
As mentioned previously, Project Ensemble takes an app-centric view of your clouds, but also focuses on how different personas, such as cloud providers and cloud consumers, in your organization interact with those applications. This will be driven by a user experience customized by learning users’ needs made possible with machine learning.
Additionally, Project Ensemble Tech Preview features:
- Business insights for curated use cases will help identify and guide users through identifying and resolving problems that impact their applications in any cloud
- A unified configuration and change history will allow users to view what has changed, rewind in time to the point of change, and completely reassemble snapshots of topologies
- Global search across all vRealize services will provide access to all relevant information in a single UI
- In-context switching to vRealize services for deeper investigation and analysis
Supporting the VMware Cloud
Initially, Project Ensemble will directly support our customers who are starting, or already underway on, the journey to hybrid cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS. The Project Ensemble UI will be built seamlessly into the VMware Cloud on AWS console, providing zero-touch setup of vRealize services to onboard and support customer deployed SDDCs. Adding and consuming cloud management should not be a daunting task and Project Ensemble strives to make this as easy as clicking a button.
Project Ensemble will also help with VMware Cloud on AWS migration planning, further enabling customers to adopt hybrid cloud quickly and confidently. Also, the user experience will focus on hybrid cloud use cases with actionable recommendations to resolve or prevent issues with performance, availability, and capacity.
Helping You Simplify Complexity
Our mission is to provide a holistic, high value view of all of your clouds and applications. We will do this by unifying the underlying power of the underlying vRealize Cloud Management services. Put another way, Project Ensemble will make clouds simple by sifting through the sea of data feeds and figuring out what YOU need to know about YOUR apps.
Alert storms, combing through and correlating metrics and logs, tracking change events, determining the impact of outages will all become relics of the previous era of cloud management.
Simplicity in managing your clouds also means spending less time, or really no time at all, managing the tools you use to keep your apps running in those clouds. Customers will benefit by having faster time-to-value via zero-touch setup and configuration. Time should be spent managing clouds, not managing the cloud management tools. With Project Ensemble, all vRealize Cloud Management services will be ready for use, gathering insights and presenting them to users, within hours.
Want a Demonstration?
Of course, we cannot wait to show Project Ensemble off and dig into some of the finer technical of this innovative solution. Be sure to join Kameswaran Subramanian from product management and Jad El-Zein from the Cloud Management Office of the CTO in VMworld session MCL1301 “Introducing Project Ensemble Tech Preview.” The session will include deeper discussions of the architecture and capabilities of Project Ensemble as well as a demonstration of the user experience.
This overview of new technology represents no commitment from VMware to deliver these features in any generally available product. Features are subject to change, and pricing and packaging for any new features/functionality/technology discussed or presented, have not been determined.
