At this past VMworld 2017 I met with Darren Orzechowski, Senior Director Product and Technical Marketing for VMware and Pete Cruz, Group Manager, Product and Technical Marketing for VMware to talk about how VMware has been modernizing their cloud management platforms. We discussed the new VMware Cloud Services as well as the recent enhancements to the vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation and vRealize Business.
VMware Cloud Services provide modern cloud management
Announced during the VMworld 2017 day one keynote, VMware Cloud Services are a set of seven modern SaaS services designed to help you manage both your on-premise and cloud It infrastructures. Orzechowski and Cruz explained that VMware Cloud Services provide a modern cloud-based approach for managing cloud usage, costs, network traffic, metrics monitoring, and analytics. VMware’s new AppDefense security offering is one of the primary services in the new SaaS suite. At this point VMware Cloud Services only runs on Amazon AWS.
vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation delivers operations automation on-premise and in the cloud
The vRealize Suite enables you to use the same tools to manage your VMware cloud and on-premise infrastructures. Refreshed this past June, the vRealize Suite enables you to complete the cloud infrastructure loop by adding cloud management, automation and cost analysis. vRealize Operations 6.6 analyzes real-time workloads and can suggest workload placement according to policies defined by the administrator. vRealize Automation 7.3 provides administrators with the ability to automatically provision VMs, storage, and networking resources across multiple private and hybrid cloud platforms. Orzechowski shared that most businesses start with vRealize Operations. Then at some point down the road management gets more complex and many businesses see the need for additional automation to allow then to react faster. The vRealize Suite provides exactly the same look and feel managing on-premise vSphere as it does the new cloud-based VMware Cloud for AWS.
vRealize Business analyzes private and public cloud costs
The latest release of vRealize Business is 7.31 which was also made available in June. vRealize Business allows you to compare costs for on-premise processing as well as the costs for running workloads in multiple cloud providers including Amazon and Azure. You can use vRealize Business to calculate cost back charges, compare actual costs to budgeted costs, look at the costs for running each of your VMs, compare private cloud vs. public cloud costs and look at cost trends over time. Cruz explained that businesses can use vRealize Business to reclaim costs for oversized and idle VMs – essentially helping to optimize your virtualization footprint. He mentioned that service providers can use vRealize Business to check the prices that they are changing to see if they are charging adequately for the services rendered. Essentially answering the question “Am I charging enough?”
Orzechowski shared that one of things that customers have liked most is that vRealize Business enables IT to elevate the conversation with business units to a business level that project leaders can understand. He said that many business units don’t see or understand the costs that are actually involved in IT and vRealize Business allows the operations team to present, explain and discuss IT costs at a business level. vRealize Business is integrated with the vRealize Operations user interface and you can see the different cost analysis displays in the integrated dashboard.