VMware debuted updates to its hybrid cloud management platform at VMworld 2015 Europe this week in Barcelona that are designed to help IT departments get deeper insight into the cost and quality of cloud services, both public and private.
The release of vRealize Automation 7 and VMware vRealize Business Standard 7 build on announcements made at VMworld in San Francisco in the summer, said Mark Leake, VMware’s director of product marketing, including VMware vRealize Operations 6.1 and VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.
vRealize Automation 7 is a major product release for VMware, according to Leake, and features new unified service blueprint capabilities to help IT departments speed up delivery of integrated multi-tier applications. The blueprints support modeling of infrastructure, networks, security, applications and custom IT services including their relationships and dependencies for hybrid clouds including vCloud Air and Amazon Web Services. They will be accessible through APIs or CLIs as code.
vRealize Business Standard 7 is designed to provide IT teams with increased transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services, including new costing and pricing policies for private and public clouds supported by vRealize Automation. It also supports Microsoft Azure.
Leake said the product updates address the realities of the software-defined data center and allow enterprises to leverage resources as efficiently as possible by giving them real-time visibility into utilization of compute, storage and networking resources. “They allow lines of business to make fact-based decisions on a service they are using.”
The projection analysis capabilities enable enterprises to fully realize the elasticity of cloud services to scale up or down as needed, he said, while being able to deploy applications quickly to meet the requirements of the business.
Mary Johnston Turner, research VP for enterprise systems management software at IDC, said what VMware is announcing may not appear sexy given that a lot of it “seems like plumbing,” but it is providing a much more efficient, simpler deployment experience for the customer. “Collectively where they are going with their management portfolio is actually a pretty big step forward for integration.”
What VMWare has done with these latest releases, said Johnston Turner, is rewrite code to bring integration and automation tools together to improve IT operations productivity and make cloud management tools more consumable. “It’s a shift from a product that you needed a lot of training to use,” she said. “It’s much more intuitive.”
Johnston Turner said there’s always been a lot of rich functionality in these tools that haven’t always been easy to access. The updates will appeal to mainstream VMware customers looking to do more automation, and give enterprises more control and insight into the cost of their cloud deployments.
IDC expects more than 65 per cent of enterprise IT organizations to commit to hybrid cloud architectures that encompass a mix of private cloud, public cloud services and/or non-cloud physical and virtual resources by the end of 2015.