vRealize Operations Cloud just launched its May 2022 update which introduces several great enhancements. Going forward, vRealize Operations Cloud will be the platform of choice for all new features and enhancements with updates to on-premises vRealize Operations later in the year. If you are currently running vRealize Operations on-premises and want to stay up to date with all the latest features and enhancements automatically, then reach out to your VMware account team to make the switch to vRealize Operations Cloud.

Note: vRealize Operations 8.6.3 was also just released as an update to the on-premises versions. This is a maintenance release that includes several bug fixes and security updates which you can read about in KB88081. However, all features and enhancements described in this blog are exclusive to vRealize Operations Cloud.

vRealize Operations Cloud is now available in nine different countries with India being the most recent addition. To see all the active locations for vRealize Operations and the rest of VMware’s SaaS portfolio, visit https://www.vmware.com/global-infrastructure.html.

In-App Guides for Cost & Capacity

If you are new to vRealize Operations Cloud or just looking to learn something new, then check out the in-product guided tours. These tours will direct you through connecting to your infrastructure, creating dashboards and reports, as well as troubleshooting and creating alerts. They will take you step-by-step through each of these processes and help you get your bearings as you navigate through vRealize Operations. New this month are additional guided tours for capacity and cost management. You will learn how to leverage the capacity assessment page to assess the capacity of your data centers and identify optimization opportunities. And the cost guides can be used to understand your overall costs for public, private, and hybrid clouds, and even get started with show-back costs.

vRA Workload Placements

vRealize Operations Cloud offers tight integration with vRealize Automation Cloud. This integration will provide you with visibility into the performance and cost of your deployments as well as determining initial placement. With this update, the initial placement of your deployments can be determined by allocation capacity modeling. Allowing you to tightly control your overcommit ratios for your most critical workloads.

Alerts

Last year, we introduced a new alerting component called Conditions. Unlike Symptoms which can be used across many alert definitions, Conditions are tied to a single definition. This may seem like a small distinction, but it is not without purpose. For example, say you have three teams responsible for vSphere cluster A, cluster B, and cluster C and each team should be notified if any of their hosts gets disconnected. In this case, you can create a symptom that will trigger an alert if a host gets disconnected from vCenter. You then create three alert definitions to notify either team A, team B, or team C depending on which host went down, and apply your new symptom to each. Later, the teams say they do not want to be notified if a host goes offline when it is in maintenance mode. No problem! Just update the symptom. This way, you only need to make the change once rather than updating each of the three alert definitions. On the other hand, if you are just creating a simple ad-hoc alert to let you know when one or more metrics go above a threshold you would use a condition. That way you do not clutter vROps with more symptoms and you can easily make modifications to your thresholds right within the alert definition itself. With this update in vRealize Operations Cloud, we now apply this best practice to alerts created from within the Troubleshooting Workbench or an object’s metrics tab. Plus if you create an ad-hoc alert that uses the same metric as another, vRealize Operations will prompt you to update the existing metric rather than creating duplicate alert definitions that could otherwise lead to unnecessary alert storms.

User Access Management

We have also improved how users and groups are configured in vRealize Operations Cloud with the introduction of scopes. Scopes are a collection of objects that can be used as templates when assigning roles to users and groups. Previously, you would assign roles to specific objects for each user or group. However, there was not a good way to duplicate this across multiple users or groups. Now, for example, you can build out a scope for all your public clouds. When you create a new user or group, simply assign the access role to the scope rather than having to select each public cloud for every user.

Support for Raw Device Mapping Storage

Raw Device Mapping (RDM) allows virtual machines to access storage LUNs directly and can be useful in some situations such as clustered services where more than one virtual machine needs access to the storage device. Now, with vRealize Operations Cloud, you’ll be able to get configuration details about your RDM’s such as compatibility mode, disk sharing, SCSI Bus Sharing, and the number of RDM’s associated with a VM.

For full details on this exciting new release, be sure to check out the release notes. If you want to learn more about how vRealize Operations can help you and your organization then head over to VMware Pathfinder. Request a trial of vRealize Operations Cloud, engage in a vRealize Operations Cloud hands on lab, or request a conversation with one of our experts today.