VMware announced new releases across its integrated VMware vRealize cloud management platform (CMP) that will make it easier for customers to implement, use, and manage hybrid cloud environments.

Guided by customer feedback, the new updates to the vRealize platform will combine to simplify how customers innovate and enable IT governance through new ‘self-driving’ operations capabilities that optimize workload performance and capacity across their hybrid clouds as well as through new and enhanced IT automation and productivity capabilities.

The new product releases -- vRealize Operations 6.7, vRealize Automation 7.4, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4, vRealize Orchestrator 7.4, vRealize Log Insight 4.6 and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 -- will come together in the VMware vRealize Suite to enable customers to manage and provision compute, network, storage and application services across hybrid cloud environments at scale.

The new operations, automation and lifecycle management features and enhancements across the integrated platform are designed to provide customers with faster overall time to value, improved ease of use, and increased control of VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) stack.

“VMware is focused on delivering innovation across our cloud management platform to help customers accelerate their digital transformation journey,” said Ajay Singh, SVP and GM, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. “Cloud transformation is difficult and can quickly derail without a capable, integrated and easy-to-operate CMP. Our investments in IT operations management and automation will further simplify and speed our customers’ use of the hybrid cloud to transform their businesses.”

VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will introduce several new and enhanced performance and capacity optimization capabilities to help customers address operational challenges. This new release will enable customers to adopt a ‘self-driving’ approach to monitoring and managing their data centers and cloud environments. VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will also feature enhanced monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to better predict, prevent, and remediate problems via integrations across VMware’s SDDC stack.

New features will include:

- New Capacity Analytics Engine: VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will introduce a new capacity analytics engine to provide customers with real-time visibility into capacity usage and demand to predict and improve capacity utilization. The new capacity analytics engine will feature ARIMA techniques and layer on periodicity, trend, and spike detection, along with a simplified user experience to help manage capacity as well as plan and forecast more accurately and faster than before. The new capacity management capabilities, which include cost analytics, will enable customers to more efficiently identify savings via automated reclamation of idle resources as well as right-sizing of environments; run “what-if” scenarios to plan for future projects; and plan capacity based on demand across clouds including VMware vSphere-based private clouds, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware Cloud on AWS and their associated costs. The new capacity analytics engine will set the stage for the introduction of machine learning capabilities over time.

- New Performance Automation based on Business and Operational Intent: This new release is designed to provide customers with continuous performance optimization of vSphere-based private clouds today, and VMware Cloud on AWS in the future, to meet application performance needs based on business intent (e.g., workload balancing to reduce software license costs by enabling license enforcement and separation or to meet performance SLAs) or operational intent (e.g., leaving headroom for business critical apps or to densify clusters). The software uses predictive analytics and enhanced automated workload balancing to drive the continuous optimization. Deep integration between vRealize Operations 6.7 and vRealize Automation 7.4 will deliver enhanced initial workload placement capabilities based on intent to provide customers with a closed loop operations experience. Customers will be able to turn on self-driving operations to continuously and automatically optimize workloads.

- New Wavefront by VMware Integration: vRealize Operations 6.7 will feature a new out-of-the-box integration with Wavefront by VMware to empower IT and application owners to triage and resolve issues faster. This integration will help to rapidly on-board Wavefront through the automatic discovery of applications and the installation and management of the required agents. Additionally, this will enable IT to provide app monitoring capabilities to their DevOps teams for apps such as Cassandra, Kafka, and Redis, along with traditional apps.

- New User Interface: This new release will be even simpler to use featuring a persona-based ‘Quick Start’ dashboard to help customers quickly perform operational tasks. It will also include updated workflows for enterprise-wide troubleshooting with metrics and logs.

VMware vRealize Automation 7.4 will introduce key innovations and improvements to help customers achieve consistent operations, greater productivity and faster time to value. This latest release will feature new modern consumption and service delivery capabilities, enhanced multi-tenancy and increased product integration including:

- New and Enhanced Curated Blueprints and OVF Files: This release will dramatically speed up application blueprinting by offering 120-plus free, curated blueprints and OVF (Open Virtualization Format) files out-of-the-box. VMware has teamed with Bitnami to add 20 new blueprints and 100-plus new OVFs of popular applications and databases such as GitLab, Hadoop, Jenkins and MongoDB to speed application development and deployment.

- New Custom Form Designer: This will enable IT teams to easily build rich service request forms for vRealize Automation 7.4 catalog items and reduce blueprint sprawl.

- Enhanced Multi-Tenancy Capabilities: The new release will introduce filter-based networking services visibility and filter-based infrastructure elements visibility per tenant as well as support the latest release of vRealize Orchestrator, which is now multi-tenant.

The new VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 will extend lifecycle management to integrated IT content management across infrastructure and cloud environments.

New features include:

- New In-Product Marketplace: This release will introduce a new and integrated “app store”-like experience for customers to consume out-of-the-box solutions from VMware and ecosystem partners. These solutions will span vRealize Operations management packs, vRealize Log Insight content packs, and vRealize Automation blueprints and plug-ins. Within the Lifecycle Manager, customers will be able to access, download, deploy and delete relevant packaged applications and content.

- New IT Content Lifecycle Management: This release will also enable IT content lifecycle management including automated release pipeline for content capturing, testing and deployment; storing and versioning of content via integration with GitLab; and, support for multi-developer use cases. The content management capabilities will allow customers to treat infrastructure content as applications and apply DevOps principles to manage vRealize content with speed, quality and consistency across multiple environments.

VMware vRealize Automation 7.4, VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4, VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.6, VMware vRealize Operations 6.7, vRealize Orchestrator 7.4, VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 are all expected to become available by the end of VMware’s Q1 FY19 (May 4, 2018).