VMware Refreshes vRealize Cloud Management to Optimize, Protect and Modernize Customers’ Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments

VMware, Inc. announced innovations across its VMware vRealize Cloud Management portfolio of on-premises and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. The new and enhanced capabilities combine to enable customers to more securely deploy and operate their hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

VMware customers IHS Markit and Provident Mexico are using VMware vRealize Cloud Management solutions to attain greater IT and business agility for faster achievement of business outcomes.

“In today’s uncertain world, enterprises are seeking to increase agility and efficiencies to remain competitive and to drive faster business growth,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. “As more businesses pursue cloud as an agility strategy, vRealize Cloud Management helps customers run their applications anywhere while maintaining consistent operations and common governance across all environments.”

Consistent Deployment and Operations of Apps, Infrastructure and Platform Services

VMware vRealize Cloud Management enables customers to consistently deploy and operate their applications, infrastructure, and platform services, from the data center to the cloud to the edge. It helps them accelerate innovation with quick and easy access to services, gain efficiency by improving visibility and automation, and improve control while mitigating risk through unified operations and governance. Today, VMware introduces new releases including VMware vRealize Automation 8.3, VMware vRealize Operations 8.3, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.3, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.3 VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and VMware Skyline; along with enhancements across VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud, and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud.

Enhanced Event and Data-Driven Infrastructure Automation

VMware vRealize Automation 8.3 delivers enhanced solutions for customers’ most critical automation use cases including self-service multi-clouds, network automation, and DevOps with actionable insights, greater security and improved performance. New VMware vRealize Automation capabilities include:

• Property Groups: The ability to create, update, read and delete property groups with predefined data. This helps customers work more efficiently by reusing groups of properties, tracking resource usage and storing metadata. vRealize Automation makes the VMware Cloud templates development more powerful and dynamic by reusing these attributes and keeping them up to date;

• Security Properties: The ability to create a more secure variable in Cloud Assembly and apply it to a cloud template or ABX action. This enables customers to better secure sensitive data in encrypted form and introduces a new method to produce more secure variables for project and consumption; and,

• VMware NSX-V to NSX-T migration: This release now supports NSX-V to NSX-T migration enabling customers to benefit from multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud networking, declarative APIs for full stack automation, built-in distributed security, advanced threat protection with intrusion detection and prevention, network threat analysis, unified networking and security for cloud native applications, and consistent policy and streamlined operations across deployments.

Additionally, this new release delivers improved performance, deployment speed, increased efficiency and helps complete tasks quicker. This includes reducing the time it takes to deploy a virtual machine — a 2x improvement from vRealize Automation 8.2. (1) The new release also enables customers to distribute a deployment across cloud zones via enhancements in placement logic.

Improved Security for AI-Powered Operations

VMware vRealize Operations delivers self-driving operations from apps to infrastructure to better optimize, plan and scale private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Powered by AI and predictive analytics, vRealize Operations delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, proactive planning, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance. VMware vRealize Operations 8.3 and VMware vRealize Operations Cloud feature:

• Data Security Standards: VMware vRealize Operations 8.3 modules meet Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 and follow the Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for U.S. Federal data security requirements; and, 

• VMware Cloud Configuration Maximums: Provides customers with better visibility into their VMware Cloud limits and their consumption relative to those limits.

VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud introduces enhanced machine learning (ML) analytics for errors and Knowledge Base (KB) correlation, ERI-FIPS compliance, VMware HCX and VMware Site Recovery Manager log integration, and native data archiving support. 

Network Visibility and Troubleshooting for Applications, Networks, and Security

VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud provide an end-to-end network view by learning from multiple data sources across virtual and physical infrastructure. Using ML for application discovery as well as assurance and verification capabilities, vRealize Network Insight makes it easier to plan, build, and manage complex networks. This new release includes:

• Customization: Enhancements to Pinboards for users to customize persistent dashboards to preserve widget filter state at the time of pinning the ability to see others’ pinboards in the Auditor role, as well as new abilities to allow users to pin no result pins;

• Multi-Cloud: VMware Cloud on AWS edge router interface statistics for improved network troubleshooting; 

• NSX-T Integrations: Data from NSX Intelligence can now be integrated for more application-centric network operations and troubleshooting visibility; and,

• VMware SD-WAN: New analytics intent for better service level agreement (SLA) monitoring and visibility with SD-WAN link utilization and metering.

Increased Visibility into Potential Issues and Support Requests Across Teams

VMware Skyline provides proactive intelligence across customers’ VMware environments to help prevent issues and unscheduled downtime. The latest release of Skyline Advisor provides expanded visibility into the vulnerabilities Skyline identifies and improved Support Request visibility enables easier use of the Log Assist automated log upload feature. This release also includes 31 new proactive Findings and Recommendations.

• Findings Catalog: New catalog provides increased visibility into all the at-risk issues and vulnerabilities that Skyline checks; and,

• Improved Support Request Visibility: A top customer request, this new feature provides Skyline Administrators with visibility of Support Requests across teams, making it easier to leverage Log Assist for automated support log bundle upload.

IHS Markit Automates Cloud Environment for Competitive Edge 

IHS Markit is a business information provider headquartered in London, serving

more than 50,000 business and government customers worldwide. To speed its time to market, the company uses vRealize Cloud Management offerings including vRealize Network Insight with VMware NSX-T to help release products faster to maintain a competitive edge. 

“We are making VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud IHS Markit’s standard tool for application, network and security visibility and troubleshooting,” said Andrew Hrycaj, Principal Network Engineer, IHS Markit.

Provident Mexico Speeds Innovation with Cloud Adoption

Financial services firm Provident Mexico sought to drive business growth by moving all of its applications to the cloud. After selecting VMware Cloud on AWS to run workloads and apps, Provident Mexico used vRealize Cloud Management to reduce its migration risk. The solution empowered IT leaders at the firm to optimize application delivery infrastructure and innovate faster to meet business speed and agility requirements. Specifically, Provident Mexico has improved its efficiency, lowered its risk and reduced its overall capacity requirements by 30% when comparing consumption of on-premises and cloud environments.

“It’s intimidating to think about putting high-value workloads in the cloud, especially in financial services, but adopting cloud is both necessary and practical to achieve IT and business goals,” said Néstor Rodríguez, Director of Technology and Change, Provident Mexico. “It used to take me around a year and a half just to place an application in production. With VMware vRealize Cloud Management, I now do it within months. It’s a game changer.”

Product Availability

VMware vRealize Automation 8.3, VMware vRealize Operations 8.3, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.3, VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.3 VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and Skyline Advisor are available. The new capabilities and enhancements to VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud are also available.