VMware vRealize Operation 6.7: Self Driving Operations for the Data Center

Today, VMware announced the upcoming release of vRealize Operations 6.7, introducing several new and enhanced performance and capacity optimization capabilities to help customers adopt a ‘self-driving’ approach to operations management. This upcoming release of vRealize Operations will deliver continuous performance optimization based on operational and business intent, efficient capacity management, proactive planning and intelligent remediation. It will provide a unified IT operations management platform to optimize, plan and scale SDDC and multi-cloud deployments, from apps to infrastructure.

Making Self-Driving Operations Real

Self-driving summarizes the strategy and vision to provide continuous and automated closed loop performance optimization at minimal cost that is based on business and operational intent, while taking into account any constraints.

With vRealize Operations 6.7, customers can define their operational and business intent, and the platform will continuously verify workload performance against defined intent, applying predictive analytics to project future requirements, and automatically balance workloads to optimize performance, densify clusters and reduce software licensing costs. Deep integration between vRealize Operations 6.7 and vRealize Automation 7.4 will enable vRealize Automation to take advantage of the analytics and intent from vRealize Operations for best initial placement of workloads.

“vRealize Operations 6.7 will help us optimize workload (databases) performance driving potential savings on licensing costs, i.e. Windows and SQL. The newest features of in-guest OS memory consumption for capacity planning will give us confidence on right-sizing while assuring application performance. We will now be able to optimize our workloads with infrastructure and application teams monitoring the same metrics, all in a unified view across on-premises and clouds. Really looking forward to upgrading our environment on day 1 of the release.”

– Darren Smith, Platform Infrastructure Team Lead, Information Services, GHD, Brisbane Australia

Let’s take a look at What’s New in vRealize Operation 6.7:

• New! Concept of “Intent”: IT teams keep complete control of the automation and workload balancing through simple settings that define business or operational intent.
  • Examples of business intent include configuring workload balancing to
    • reduce software license costs by enabling license enforcement and separation
    • meet performance SLAs
    • meet compliance requirements
  •  Examples of operational intent include:
    • leaving headroom for business-critical applications
    • densifying clusters to reduce costs.

You can combine multiple such requirements to specify the desired intent through simple and intuitive user interface.

• New! Capacity Analytics engine: VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 introduces a new, real-time, predictive capacity analytics engine that enables customers to quickly gain visibility into capacity usage and demand, to predict and improve capacity utilization. The capacity analytics engine uses ARIMA techniques and layers on periodicity, trend and spike detection to provide real time updates and forecasts and a simplified user experience helps manage capacity and plan more accurately than ever before. The new capacity management capabilities also directly correlate capacity and cost analytics to more efficiently identify savings. Customers can, proactively detect capacity risk and automate reclamation and right-sizing; run “what-if” scenarios to plan capacity needs and best fit for workloads across VMware vSphere-based private clouds, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware Cloud on AWS.
• New! Continuous Performance Automation based on Business and Operational Intent: Leveraging intent with the new the capacity analytics engine, predictive DRS and automated workload balancing, vRealize Operations 6.7 provides customers with continuous performance optimization of a vSphere-based private clouds

Key highlights of vRealize operations 6.7

1. Enhanced user interface

This release makes vRealize Operations even simpler to use, featuring a use case and persona-based ‘Quick Start’ dashboard to help you quickly perform operational tasks. It also includes updated workflows for enterprise-wide troubleshooting with metrics and logs.

2. Automating performance based on intent

• The first step is to access the current performance of your datacenter

• Simply define intent by configuring settings, such as, target utilization, cluster headroom and defining tag based placement requirements. Some examples of tag-based placement include:
  • SLA Tiers: Gold, Silver Bronze
  • License Policies: Windows, Oracle, Linux
  • Compliance: PCI, HIPAA
  • App affinity policies
•  After you have defined intent, it is time to turn on self-driving operations by automating workload balancing and performance optimization. You can decide how to automate optimization action, with a choice to:
  • Run it now manually, based on recommendations
  • Schedule it for an automated ongoing optimization
  • Automate to run when performance troubles occur, and desired performance intent is not met.

3. Assess capacity, costs and savings and automate optimization

• Intuitive dashboards help prioritize which data centers to re-risk, view total cost of ownership and get detailed insights on potential cost savings from reclamation, densification and license separation and enforcement. Below is an example of the kind of savings opportunities are presented. As you can see, cost data is directly correlated with capacity analytics.
• After you get an idea of which data centers to prioritize and what could be the potential cost savings, you can easily automated optimization actions. This includes reclamation, right-sizing and  automating workload balancing to reduce license costs as well as densification to consolidate workloads into minimal clusters while assuring performance, target utilization & defined intent it met.

4. Predict demand, shortfalls and get recommendations

The new capacity analytics engine is able to:

• • View historical trends & predict the most constrained resource: CPU, Memory, Disk space and
  • Give recommendations to either reclaim unused capacity or even add capacity

5. Model what-if scenarios to figure out best fit for new workloads across private cloud, VMware Cloud and AWS and AWS.

6. Integration of vRealize Operations and Wavefront by VMware.

vRealize Operations 6.7 features a new out-of-the-box integration with Wavefront by VMware to empowering IT and application owners to triage and resolve issues faster. vRealize Operations easily on-boards Wavefront app monitoring by automatically discovering virtual machines and apps and provisioning the required OS and App data collectors to send metrics to Wavefront. This capability enables IT to gain control and provide app monitoring capabilities to their dev ops teams for the next gen apps such as Cassandra, Kafka, PCF, etc. as well as traditional apps such as Exchange, AD, Sharepoint, Weblogic, etc.

These are just some of the highlights of the new release. Stay tuned for General Availability announcement.

For more information, take the guided tour: https://vrealize.sharedemos.com/

Visit the vRealize Operations home page: https://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-operations.html