vRealize Suite Announcement - March 2020

calendar Mar 10, 2020 · 4 min read · VMware vRA vRealize vRO vROps vRSLCM vSphere  ·
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Today is a significant day for VMware with the announcements coming out primarily around vSphere 7 and the implementation of Project Tanzu. The vSphere client will now natively support running containers and VMs within the same unified console, the vSphere Client. One very interesting new feature is the VMware Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) that will be introduced to simplify the management of firmware, drivers and ESXi bundles. For more information on today's announcements, check out the blog here. But what about the vRealize Suite announcements? That's what we are really interested in!

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.1 (vRSLCM)

The full blog is available here, but a few key things of note are below.

  • Multi-Tenancy Support - vRSLCM will now enable you to manage vRA tenant organisations
  • GitHub Integration - Enable content sharing and version control with your GitHub environment

vRealize Automation 8.1 (vRA)

The full blog is available here, but a few key things that have got me excited are below.

  • Custom Resources - Any object can once again be created as a custom resource, similar to vRA 7.x
  • Custom Day 2 Actions - The ability to run custom day 2 actions on objects returns and is similar to vRA 7.x and can be further enhanced with policies.
  • Launch Pipelines from Service Catalog - Previously Service Broker could only present catalog items which were a Cloud Assembly blueprint, AWS CloudFormation template, vRO workflow or ABX action. This integration will enable Code Stream pipelines to be called directly from the Service Broker UI.
  • vSphere 7 Support - Kind of an obvious one, but vRA 8.1 will support vSphere 7.0 including the ability to create and manage Kubernetes supervisor clusters and namespaces.
  • PowerShell Support for ABX Actions - Probably my favourite new feature, in addition to the node.js and Python support, you can now create ABX actions directly with PowerShell code. This will hopefully enable many more organisations to start benefiting from the serverless functionality provided by ABX.

vRealize Orchestrator 8.1 (vRO)

The full blog is available here, but a few key things to note are below.

  • Tree View returns!!! - Okay, maybe I am a little too excited by this, but vRO 8.0 was effectively unusable with the new HTML5 client without this. Can't wait to explore the new HTML5 UI now!
  • Run and Debug Workflow Elements - Instead of having to Run or Debug an entire workflow, you will now be able to test each element of the workflow. For anyone that has created large, complex workflows, this will be a welcome surprise. It will be interesting to see how this integrates with workflow input values though, if you're only running one element, but that element requires an input from the workflow. Let's wait and see.
  • New scripting languages - This is huge! For anyone that has invested time in vRO, you would have been frustrated at one point in time with only having JavaScript as the language of workflows (and an old version at that). With this release, additional scripting languages of node.js, Python and PowerShell have been added, matching the support provided for vRA 8.1 ABX actions.

vRealize Operations Manager 8.1 (vROps)

Another big release, and the full blog is available here, but a few key things to note are below.

  • vSphere 7.0 Support – Another obvious one, but all of the vSphere 7.0 new constructs will be supported in vROps 8.1, including managing containers, viewing container topology and the usual KPI’s, dashboards, capacity planning etc.
  • Public Clouds - VMware on AWS can now be natively managed through vROps 8.1 along with NSX-T support and an integration has been added for Google Cloud Platform which was missing in the 8.0 release. This is in addition to the existing Microsoft Azure integration.
  • Integration with Slack - Native integration with Slack has been requested by several customers and this will provide a great way for keeping up to date with your vROps alerts.
  • Support for vVols - Arguably one of the most under-utilised VMware products, vROps will be able to collect metrics and report on vVols the same as all other objects.
  • Network Aware Monitoring - Last but not least, vROps is finally integration with vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) to provide network aware troubleshooting. It will be interesting to see how this comes together.

Well, that's it. I hope this post was helpful and the new features will help you deliver value to your business.

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