Maintaining, monitoring and maintaining your infrastructure in day 2 and beyond operations is one of the most challenging aspects of daily tasks for IT admins. With VMware vSphere infrastructure, the vRealize Operations suite of products provides powerful tools and capabilities to keep the VMware vSphere environment in check from an operations perspective. It effectively allows you to keep a pulse on the vSphere environment and KPI metrics to quickly and easily spot issues and potential problems in the environment. VMware has continued to improve the vRealize Operations Suite of products, introducing new and exciting features with each release. In conjunction with VMworld, VMware has announced the release of VMware vRealize Operations 8.0. Let’s take a look at VMware vRealize Operations vROPs 8.0 announced new features to take a look and see what features this new release brings to the table.
vRealize Self-Driving Operations
VMware in the past few releases of vRealize Operations has introduced and continued to improve upon what it calls “self-driving” operations. Powered by machine-learning or ML, the self-driving operations feature allows the vRealize platform to help “automatically” optimize, plan and scale your vSphere-powered hybrid cloud based on business-intent which is key. The infrastructure can be configured and optimized to align with the overall landscape of business-objectives in an automated way. The automatic performance optimization features play into the overall automation and optimization vision of the vSphere vRealize Operations platform.
The self-driving automation provided by the vRealize Operations suite helps to deliver on the following:
- Intent-driven performance optimization
- Automated capacity and cost management
- Remediation based on intelligent operations
- Integrated compliance features
What do these include?
Continuous performance optimization – Allows continuous optimization of application performance with automatic workload placement and workload balancing based on operational and business intent.
Efficient capacity and cost management – This feature helps to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-tim ML-based capacity analytics correlated with cost analytics, improving utilization and consoidation while proactively planning for the future.
Intelligent remdiation – This helps to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot faster and actionable insights and native hybrid cloud integrations.
Integrated compliance – Helps to reduce risk and enforce IT and regulatory standards with integrated compliance and configuration drift.
While these four self-driving operations features have been introduced in previous releases, the new vRealize Operations 8.0 improves on all four areas.
Additionally, there is a new release that is new to the entire product line, VMware vRealize Operations Cloud. This will provide a feature-parity enabled offering for VMware Cloud on AWS customers and VMware’s future cloud offerings.
VMware vRealize Operations Cloud
Currently, the vRealize Operations Cloud offering is in beta. VMware is offering a free sign-up for the vRealize Operations Cloud offering. You can visit the vRealize Operations Cloud page to sign up for the beta service.
VMware vRealize Operations 8.0 Announced New Features
Now, let’s take a look at the new features that have been introduced with the vRealize Operations 8.0 release that has been announced.
VMware vSphere Operations 8.0 helps businesses to have consistent, intent-driven, hybrid cloud operations platfrom that allows automated capabilities for the hybrid cloud environments.
Hyper-converged infrastructure operations – The new vSphere Operations 8.0 will deliver the most comprehensive performance, capacity, troubleshooting, and compliance management for VMware vSANof any other previous vSphere Operations platform.
Native Application aware operations – This release of vROPs will deliver native service monitoring including some 20 out of the box applications
Compliance – Most businesses fall under some sort of compliance and regulatory requirements. The new vROPs 8.0 will deliver compliance and regulatory visibility across vSphere, vSAN, and NSX configurations
Multi-cloud monitoring – Native support for AWS and Azure monitoring and troubleshooting, integration with CloudHealth
Continuous Performance Optimization
New with 8.0 is the new intent-driven performance optimization for VMware Cloud on AWS with cross-cluster workload balancing and rightsizing.
New integration between vRealize Operations 8.0 and vRealize Automation 8.0. What does this mean? This will provide feature parity from previous releases and will take things to the next level with shared contracts to build closed-loop cloud management platforms (CMPs)
Efficient Capacity and Cost Management
Efficient Capacity and Cost Management now includes HCI capacity/cost management and planning. Additionally private cloud cost comparison across data centers. You can monitor costs for VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure and enhanced private cloud costing with per datacenter cost driver. There is public cloud costing via CloudHealth Integration.
Really great features with this area include identifying the cheapest cluster to run workloads in your envirnoment and the ability to monitor VM costs. You can also monitor VMware Cloud on AWS costs.
Intelligent Remediation
There is a new troubleshooting workbench with this release that has some really great features for visibility and troubleshooting across the vSphere environment. The new troubleshooting workbench is a machine-learning enabled tool that detects anomalies in the data collected across the vSphere environment. This includes combining events and properties with visibility across the infrastructure landscape.
This workbench tool aggregates the information metrics available from the environment and using machine-learning, it is able to provide intelligence to the metrics to quickly identify things that stand out or are abnormal. You can run multiple troubleshooting workbenches at once as well.
Integrated Compliance
Regulatory and compliance regulations are continuing to improve with each release and this release of vROPs is no different. As covered with this release, you can manage the configuration of the entire stack including vSphere, HCI, and NSX-T. For compliance you have access to templates like PCI, HIPAA, DISA, ISO, CIS, and FISMA. You can also create your own compliance templates as well.
vRealize Operations 8.0 New Platform Enhancements
Other enhancements to the platform itself are equally exciting about this release. This includes a “continuous availability” mechanism across fault domains, using layer-3 networking for vSphere Operations 8.0. If one site goes down, the vROPs platform can still provide full access to data and functionality.
Project Magna – This is an exciting new component of vROPs 8.0. This is an extention of the machine-learning automated vSAN performance tuning service. With vSAN, the new vROPs 8.0 platform can “auto-optimize the underlying vSAN infrastructure for the needs of applications running in workloads. This helps to deliver even greater performance and efficient operations across the application stack.
The new Project Magna service will be delivered as a combination of VMware Cloud services integrated with vROPs.
Wrapping Up
There are so many new and exciting products and solutions coming down the pipes with VMware solutions, it is hard to know where to start. VMware vRealize Operations 8.0 is going to be at the core of the new “self-driving” infrastructure solution that VMware is redirecting their focus on. With VMware vRealize Operations vROPs 8.0 announced new features, there are plenty of new functionality additions to make this the best vROPs to date as well as the most “intelligent” and “hybrid cloud” aware.
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