Few organizations will have a single cloud. Many will subscribe to several and have hybrid clouds as well, so flexibility in a cloud management platform is important.
This week broadened coverage of its VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) suite by adding support for Microsoft’s Azure cloud, a sign that Azure is picking up more backing from IT departments.
The announcement was one of several improvements made to components of vRealize.
“We support a whole bunch of endpoints” including Amazon AWS Machine, Citrix Machine, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and OpenStack, Mahesh Kumar, Vmware’s senior director of product marketing, said in an interview.
“What we are seeing is Azure is a predominant cloud player at this point, especially for Windows-centric shops. So it just made sense to tackle that.”
vRA 7.2, supports Azure with subscription and Active Directory user information, he said with the same resolution, policy and governance modes offered to other deployments.
Admins can also create blueprints with Azure VMs.”Storage and networking will be simple to achieve, while customization through Event Broker is also possible. Lastly we provide granular Azure networking support from within vRealize Automatio if users or administrators want to set up things like network related workflows using subnets for deploying application load balancers.”
Users can start, stop and reclaim resources of VMs in public and private clouds. Also Azure cloud formation templates and vRO (vRealize Operations) templates can work together for additional automation and orchestration.”
Also added in version 7.2 is support for lifecycle management of containers.
Many organizations are moving from client server to cloud native apps using containers and a microservices architecture, Kumar said, although many still use both. Now 7.2 supports any container host that exposes APIs.
This is enabled by VMware Admiral, an open source container management solution. vRA integrates into Admiral across blueprints and catalogues to provide provisioning and other capabilities. It enables collaboration between cloud admins and development teams for traditional, containerized, and hybrid applications.
“If I’m a developer I can go to my catalogue and be up and running with my container in seconds,” said Kumar.
Container support has also been added to new versions of VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN.
Also new in the vRA suite:
–vRealize Log Insight, the log analysis tool for unstructured data, is now updated to v4.o with a new user interface that’s similar to other VMware products. There’s also enhanced alert filtering, including across Content Packs.
–vRealize Operations for performance management is up to v6.4. It enhances cross-domain collaboration, through new role-based dashboard, which allows teams to share and collaborate on analytics by getting differing views of the same data.
There’s also now guided troubleshooting workflow for faster problem resolution so admins can see what’s happening at a cluster or folder level.
The new vSphere 6.5 features the vCenter Server Appliance, said to be a simplified building block for vSphere environments that offers an easy to deploy and manage single virtual appliance. It will offer customers simplified patching, upgrading, backup and recovery, high availability and more, including a doubling in both scale and performance of their vCenter Server environments.
Other new capabilities include
–REST APIs to mprove both the IT and developer experience by enabling greater control and automation of virtual infrastructure for modern applications;
–vSphere Client, based on HTML5, it will simplify the work of admini via a modern, native tool that meets the performance and usability needs and expectations of users for day-to-day operations;
–VM Encryption, virtual machine-level encryption to protect against unauthorized data access safeguarding data at rest as well as virtual machines that are moved with VMware vMotion;
–and Secure Boot, which will prevent the tampering of images as well as the loading of unauthorized components into vSphere environments.
The new versions of vRealize Automation and vSphere will be available shortly.
