By Rich Bourdeau
vCloud Automation Center 6.1 continues VMware investment to deliver an extensible, multi-vendor cloud automation frame work that allows IT to deliver personalized business relevant infrastructure, applications and other IT services with the least amount of effort and lowest amount of risks. New capabilities of the 6.1 release help VMware maintain its position as the premier cloud automation solution. Enhancements in this release can be grouped into the one of the following three categories:
Extending vCAC Core Capabilities
vCloud Automation Center contains comprehensive, purpose built capabilities for automating the delivery of a wide variety of multi-vendor IT services. As full featured and customizable via policies as our solution is, we cannot anticipate all the ways companies will want to use software. For this reason we have invested heavily into making our software as extensible as possible. In this release we have improved our extensibility with the following new and enhanced capabilities:
- Enhanced Interfaces for accessing Automation Services
vCloud Automation Center has number of interfaces that can be used to request and manage vCAC’s infrastructure, application and custom IT services from existing service catalogs and application. In Q2, VMware delivered a VCO plug-in library of workflows for requesting and managing VCAC Services. With this release we have enhanced our API. Simplifying it to make it more verb oriented and easier to use. Now with a single API call you can accomplish what previously took multiple API calls. In addition we have added a command Line Interface and Java SDK.
- New and Updated vCenter Orchestrator Workflows
vCenter Orchestrator is the preferred approach for adapting and extending vCloud Automation Center. In the last 6 months VMware and our partners have enhanced or extended over 20 different vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins. Containing hundreds of new workflows that can be used to integrate multi-vendor components from Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Afore Solutions, Acronis, BT Diamond HP EMC, F5 HDS, Infoblox, Intigua and others.
- Enhanced Integration with VMware vCloud Suite Components
ITBM Standard Edition allows companies to compare the costs of their vCAC based private cloud Services with equivalent services in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure allowing companies to make better choices of where they place specific workloads. New in this release users can now compare private cloud costs against VMware Hybrid Cloud Service (vCHS). In addition all ITBM Standard reporting is now vCAC organizationally aware. Reports can now be aggregated by Tenant, Business Group and other vCAC policy constructs.
Enhancing Application Service Delivery
This release contains several new features that simplify the deployment and management of both single machine and complex multi-tiered applications.
- NSX Enhancements
To create secure, high performing and scalable applications you frequently need to configure network and security services in the context of the application being deployed. In this release, vCloud Automation Center enhances the integration with NSX by simplifying the configuration to allow multiple applications to share the same logical router. In addition, security groups can dynamically be configured allowing each app tier to have their own unique security group.
- Simplified Modeling of Large Composite Applications
Many companies have complex application typologies that contain multiple modules or sub applications which although have dependencies are frequently released on different cycles. Maintaining one application definition can be complex to create and maintain. The new composite application definitions allow the aggregation of several application deployment profiles into a single application definition with dependencies across different modules.
- Enhanced Puppet Integration
The initial Puppet integration in release 6.0 was focused on the initial deployment of multi-tier applications and middleware. This releases puppet integration has been enhanced to support full life-cycle operations like update, rollback, scale out/in and tear down of deployments.
Improving User Experience
This release adds several new features designed to improve the user experience.
- GUI Language Localization
The consumer portal has been localized to 10 different languages designed to enhance usability for non-english speaking users.
- Bulk import of Existing VMs
This capability simplifies the effort to place hundreds and thousands of machines under vCAC Control allowing for consistent governance and life-cycle management of existing and new machines and applications.
- Configurable columns
Views now have columns which can be dynamically configured, sorted reordered and adjusted to deliver unique displays that meet each user’s unique requirements.
Learn more about vCloud Automation Center and how automating cloud service delivery can cut cost while accelerating access to IT applications and resources.
- Watch the VMware IT Private Cloud – Exceeding Expectations video (2:28 min)
- Learn using the VCloud Automation 6.x Video Library
- Try HOL-SDC-1321 – vCloud Automation Center 6 from A to Z
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