VMware’s vRealize Automation (vRA – formerly known as vCloud Automation Center) 6.1 enhances its integration with VMware’s NSX 6.1 to provide even more virtual networking and security capabilities. Thus enabling IT to deliver business services on-demand with the appropriate network connectivity, availability and security automatically configured. With these new capabilities of the 6.1 release, VMware leads the charge in cloud automation and virtual networking and security for your software-defined datacenter (SDDC).
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, vRealize Automation enhances the integration with NSX in the following ways:
Connectivity
Proper network connectivity is fundamental to any business service. vRealize Automation simplifies the network configuration by allowing multiple applications to share the same NSX virtual distributed router for optimal resource utilization and simplified management. This distributed router provides high performance east to west routing at line rate across 100s of virtual machines. In addition, multicast free virtual networks, dynamic routing protocols and DHCP relay to an external DHCP server are supported. Hence organizations can guarantee that their services are deployed with the right connectivity automatically.
Security
Ensuring appropriate security policies are applied, is one of, if not the most critical step to deliver and manage your applications and data. Now business services can be deployed with on-demand security. The appropriate security policies, like firewall rules, intrusion detection, and anti-virus can be defined at each application tier to allow unique security for each tier. When the business service is provisioned, dynamic security groups are configured with the defined policies to safeguard the service from day one. These services can also be tagged with a security label, for example DB servers, PCI, HIPPA that enforces policies dynamically based on the tags (e.g. type of application) throughout their lifecycle. Finally, application isolation for these business services can also defined to fence the service from the rest of the network entirely or to deny all traffic to the service expect for what is defined in the applied security policies. Therefore organizations can enforce security policies while still enabling self-service requests for app infrastructure.
Availability
vRealize Automation’s rounds out it’s networking support by enhancing availability for business services. Whether applications needs to be added to an existing load balancer pool or needs it’s own dedicated load balancer this can be achieved through vRA’s NSX integration. Delivers the ability to add applications to an existing NSX or 3rd party load balancer. Further, an application can be provisioned with an on-demand dedicated NSX load balancer in a one-armed model. Thus providing organizations with more availability options for their applications.
Learn more about vRealize Automation 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
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