I sat down for a briefing with Mahesh Kumar, senior director of product marketing, cloud management at VMware to discuss the latest cloud management announcements that VMware made at VMworld 2017 Europe in Barcelona. Kumar mentioned that VMware has been working hard at extending the multiple cloud and on-premise management capabilities of their vRealize Suite 2017. He mentioned that today 60% of VMware’s customers are currently using the public cloud and that 48% were using multiple clouds including AWS and Azure. However, even though there’s been strong cloud adoption their customers still expect to run 30% of their workloads on-premise by 2020. VMware’s updated vRealize Suite provides enhancements to extend their virtualization management capabilities from on-premise across multiple clouds providing intelligent operations, better automation and support for DevOps-ready IT.
New vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager
A new addition to the vRealize Suite, Lifecycle Manager was announced on September 12. It automates the deployment, configuration and upgrading of the products in the vRealize Suite. It provides automated pre-checks, configuration, health monitoring and upgrades across the vRealize Suite of products.
Intelligent workload placement with vRealize Operations 6.6
The new release of vRealize Operations 6.6 now provides significantly more intelligent workload placement than it did in previous releases. vRealize Operations 6.6 can now automate workload balancing across clusters and data stores based on costing information provided by vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3. vRealize Business for Cloud can evaluate and compare the costs for running workloads in the private cloud as well as public clouds including AWS and Azure. vRealize Operations 6.6 can use this information to effectively place workloads on the most cost effective platforms.
VMware Integrated OpenStack 4
An open source technology designed to help you stand up private clouds, OpenStack is now provided by VMware as a part of their new VMware Integrated OpenStack offering. Designed to provide a simple EC2-style deployment for OepnStack on the VMware platform, VMware Integrated OpenStack provides a 20 minute deployment experience and it is fully integrated with the vRealize Suite for management. Kumar explained that this offering will be particularly interesting to communication service providers where OpenStack is used by a number of telcos. VMware will provide a new Carrier Edition of the product.
Expanded DevOps and Container Support in vRealize Automation 7.3
Designed to simplify and automate common IT management operations, vRealize Automation 7.3 features expanded container support. It now supports Admiral 1.1, VMware’s container management portal, Virtual Container Host instances generated by vSphere Integrated Containers and Docker hosts. The new release of vRealize Automation also provides support for Docker volumes enabling you to create new volumes and automatically attach them to containers.
VMware vRealize Suite 2017 is expected to become available by Nov. 3, 2017. There are three editions: Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. Pricing for the Standard edition will start at $3,745.
