Last week I was fortunate enough to be briefed by VMware on there new “Intelligent Operations” offering, and given a view of what’s new, and the rationale about the changes. The changes are spread amongst the vRealise suite/portfolio of products including:
- vRealise Operation 6.6
- vRealise Log Insight 4.5
- vRealise Business of Cloud 7.3 (Standard Edition)
- vRealise Network Insight 3.4 (Actually, isn’t included as part of the vRealise/vCloud Suite)
Highlights: vRealise Operations 6.6
vRealise 6.6 has new HTML5 user-interface which hopes to deliver quicker navigation using a new set of dashboards. These dashboards are ‘persona-based” which means based around the task you doing information is presented accordingly – so perhaps your troubleshooting, you use one set of dashboards, whereas if you looking at capacity, and looking free up or merely view where you have spare capcity you click accordingly.
vRealise Operations has been updated to include more VSAN which means weather you building your own hyperconvergence with say VSAN Ready Nodes or else using something like VxRAIL. vRealise Operations will report on performance, capacity, logs, configurations and health. It can report his information across stretched clusters too.
With this multi-cluster awareness, vRealise Operations attempts to automate workload balancing across objects that present across clusters – whereas most of the built-in features of vSphere act within a cluster – so will attempt balance workloads across the cluster and data stores. It will perform a sanity check against your DRS settings, to make sure DRS takes action before contention is allowed to take place. Finally, it will orchestrate “initial placement” when coupled to vRealise Automation.
Finally, there’s a bunch of new features that spotlight of the operational issues – so there is a new dashboard focused on vSphere Hardening Compliance which is focused across all the SDDC components (vSAN, NSX, vCenter and so on), with a special focus on compliance standards such as PCI and HIPPA. So you will get badges indicating your hardening score, together with recommendations based on the hardening guide and KB’s generally.
Highlights: vRealise Business for Cloud 7.3
This tool allows you to monitor your various public (Amazon, Azure, etc) and private cloud commitments and report on them – allowing to monitor your costs, and plan your cloud spending. The idea is avoid “Bill Shock” and provide the sort of business intelligence to help determine where to place workloads, and whether their opportunties to claim back, relocate or decommission workloads. The new version extends on existing capablitlies including cost analysis for all the services provided in Amazon and Azure, as well as “instance” level analysis. As a consequence there are improved pricing capabilities as well as more pre-configured reports you can run.
Hightlights: vRealise LogInsight 4.5
The new version of LogInsight offers greater in-context intergration with the rest of the vRealise Operations suite. This means clicks, right-clicks and so on will take you directly to the dashboard or analytics mode so long as single-sign on has been correctly configured. Data from LogInsight relayed back into the dashboards that make vROps. The RESTful API’s have been updated to reflect this new functionality, as well as new multi-destinaiton agent.
Highlights: Network Insight 3.4
Network Insight (not included in the vRealise Suite) is focused on analysing traffic across public and private clouds. The Enterpise Edition of Network Insight now adds support for managing cross-cloud security to Amazon AWS. It adds visibility for the VPC construct in AWS, as well as the capacity to monitor EC2 instances within the VPC. Iniatially, Network Insight was focused on VMware’s micro-segmentation with NSX (as well as the physical layer), but they seem to extend this functionality beyond the remit of VMware.