What’s New With vRealize Automation 7.5 (On-Demand Webinar)

Posted on October 2, 2018 by Tim

What’s New With vRealize Automation 7.5 (On-Demand Webinar)

On September 20th, 2018, VMware released vRealize Automation version 7.5. VMware vRealize Automation is a cloud automation tool that accelerates the delivery of IT services through automation and pre-defined policies, providing high level of agility and flexibility for developers, while enabling IT teams to maintain frictionless governance and control.

What vRealize Automation Delivers:

Agility through cloud automation Orchestration – Accelerate the end-to-end delivery and management of infrastructure and applications.
Governance through frictionless governess policies – Ensure that users receive the right-size resources or applications from the right cloud at the appropriate service level for the jobs they need to perform.
Choice through flexibility – Provision and manage multi-vendor, multi-cloud infrastructure, and stateful / stateless applications by leveraging new and existing infrastructure, tools, and processes.
Cost savings through efficiency – Reduce operational cost by replacing time-consuming, manual processes and gain additional cost savings through automated reclamation of inactive resources.

If you are looking to learn what’s new in vRealize Automation 7.5, you can check out the on-demand webinar at the link below.

What’s New With vRealize Automation 7.5: https://portal.inxpo.com/ID/VMWare/14/

vRealize Log Insight 4.5 is Now Live!

Posted on June 14, 2017 by Tim

vRealize Log Insight 4.5 is Now Live!

On June 13th, 2017, VMware released vRealize Log Insight 4.5! vRealize Log lnsight delivers heterogeneous and highly scalable log management with intuitive, actionable dashboards, sophisticated analytics and broad third-party extensibility. It provides deep operational visibility and faster troubleshooting across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Below, you can fins a list of what’s new in this release of vRealize Log Insight 4.5!

Whats New?

This release of VMware vRealize Log Insight delivers product improvements and updates to the previous release, including these features:

Server Features

Added API to query alert execution and notification history
Added ability to specify basic authentication for webhooks
New product configuration APIs added
The source field is maintained when forwarding from vRealize Log Insight forwarder to a vRealize Log Insight server
Hosts on the /admin/hosts page can now be exported
Support for external load balancers has been deprecated
VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) is recommended for vRealize Log Insight. Native AD support is now deprecated. See the following Knowledge Base article for migration information: https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2148976

General User Interface Items

Dashboard legend mouse-over in one widget now highlights corresponding chart items across widgets
Added ability to show a given time across all dashboard chart widgets simultaneously
Separate options are available for descriptions and recommendations for user alerts.
User alert history for aggregation queries now includes count

Agent Items

Added ability to send unaltered raw syslog to destination server
Added ability for agent syslog parser to parse structured data (SD), PRI, PROCID, and MSGID syslog fields
Added auto-update checkbox option on MSI user interface
Added support for sending logs to multiple destinations
Added directory wildcard support
Added support for Photon OS
Support for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has been deprecated

Content Packs

Updated General and vSphere content packs
VSAN and vROps content packs included out of the box

Documentation and Links:

Download Link:
- https://my.vmware.com/en/group/vmware/get-download?downloadGroup=VRLI-450&productId=598&rPId=12336
Release Notes:
- http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/LogInsight/45/VMwarevRealizeLogInsight45ReleaseNotes.html

vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 Now Live!

Posted on June 14, 2017 by Tim

vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 Now Live!

On June 13th, 2017, VMware released its updated vRealize Operation Manager 6.6 solution! VMware vRealize Operations integrated with vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Business for Cloud helps plan, manage and scale SDDC and multi-cloud environments with unified monitoring, automated performance management, cloud planning and capacity optimization. Check out the below list of enhancements that have been made to the vRealize Operations Manager solution!

Whats New?

vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 focuses on enhancing product usability, accelerating time to value and improving troubleshooting capabilities.

Simplified usability and faster time to value capabilities:
- New HTML5 user interface provides an easier and consistent experience.
- The Getting Started dashboard allows for quick navigation.
- Persona based dashboards provides for answers in one place. Dashboards are separated into categories such as Operations, Capacity and Utilization, Performance Troubleshooting, Workload Balance, and Configuration and Compliance.
- Out of the box integration with vSAN and vRealize Automation provides quick time to value.
Watch videos related to the new dashboards that are introduced with vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 here.
Added Native vSAN management capabilities:
- Allows for centralized management across stretched clusters.
- Ability for complete vSAN management, which includes administering performance, capacity, logs, and configuration and health.
Fully Automated Workload Balancing:
- Ensures performance across the datacenter’s with fully automated workload balancing, across clusters and across data stores.
- Ensures DRS Configurations and provides the option to set DRSautomation level for individual objects.
- Predictive DRS takes action to preempt resource contention.
- Utilizes operations analytics to optimize initial placement of workloads through vRealize Automation.
Watch this video for a demo about automatic workload placement.
Additional out-of-the-box compliance capabilities:
- Ability to tackle compliance problems through the new vSphere hardening dashboard
- Extends compliance through PCI & HIPAA compliance for vSphere.
- Ensures business configurations through new cluster, host, and VM configuration dashboards

Documentation and Links:

Release Notes – http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vrops/66/vrops-66-release-notes.html
Download Page – http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=VROPS-660

vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 Now Live!

Posted on June 14, 2017 by Tim

vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 Now Live!

On June 13, 2017, VMware released an updated version of its vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 solution. VMware vRealize Business for Cloud automates cloud costing analysis, consumption metering, cloud comparison and planning, delivering the cost visibility and business insights you need to run your cloud more efficiently. Below is a summary of what’s new in this release of vRealize Business for Cloud.

Whats New?

Private Cloud

Partial vCenter Server support. You can select a set of virtual machines or clusters to add into vRealize Business for Cloud, instead of adding the complete vCenter Server.

Public Cloud

Enhancements to Azure.
- Azure is considered as a first class citizen in vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3, which provides the detailed costing, pricing mechanism, showback information, and VM Statistics for Non-EA accounts.
- You can now define pricing policies for Azure virtual machines that are deployed directly on Azure and are deployed by vRealize Automation.
- vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 can provide upfront price for Azure blueprint and if a Azure machine is deployed from vRealze Automation, vRealize Business for Cloud can compute cost-to-date.
Enhancements to AWS.
Support import from blueprint for cloud comparison.

Cloud Comparison

Procurement Planning support.
Support for VMware Cloud on AWS. Procurement planning (What-If Analysis) in vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 supports cost comparison with VMware Cloud on AWS and enables you to assess placement of new or existing workloads across private cloud and public clouds, including VMware Cloud on AWS.
Import from Blueprint in for cloud comparison.

Pricing

Calculate expense-to-date value for virtual machines.
Calculate price of deployment constructs.
Enable utilization based pricing.
Configure pricing method for resources.
Configure Pricing Update Strategy.
Configure network pricing.
Track daily change in utilization for price calculation.
Compute pricing at Organization Virtual Data Center (Org VDC) level.

Licenses and Roles

Support multiple license keys. You can now enter multiple license keys as part of license administration.
Additional access for vRealize Suite Standard license key.
Support Business Controller Role for Standalone vRealize Business for Cloud.

Reports

Schedule a Report. You can now schedule and email a custom report or the out-of-the-box reports to a set of recipients on daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Updates to the Daily Price Report. vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 calculates the virtual machine price accurately based on its CPU, storage and memory resource utilization or allocation and its change within a day.
New Reports. Additional reports are added in vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3:
- Azure Instances
- Azure Resources
- Several out-of-the-box reports (that provides operational and cost visibility)
Enhanced Public APIs of Reports. You can now use the Public APIs to generate reports in the VMware Identity Manager integrated vRealize Business for Cloud setup.

Integration

Tighter integration with vRealize Operations Manager.
Compatible with latest versions of VMware solutions. see the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix.
Support VMware NSX Manager.

Documentation and Links:

Download Link:
- Download Link for vRBC 7.3
Release Notes:
- Release Notes for vRBC 7.3
Documentation Link:
- Documentation for vRBC 7.3

Missed The Latest VMware Announcements In The Past Month? Check Out This Summary!

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Tim

Missed The Latest VMware Announcements In The Past Month?

Check Out This Summary!

Have you been busy lately and haven’t keep up to date with the latest VMware announcements over the last month or two? If so, you have missed quite a bit! So I thought I would make it easy on you and pull together all the recent announcements related to product updates, acquisitions, promotions, partnerships, VMworld, Wanna Cry Ransomeware, etc. This summary has a lot of great information that you want to be aware. I highly recommend that you read through the full list of announcements to be sure you are aware of them.

One link I would like to draw your attention to specifically is under “Security” which takes you to a VMware blog about the “WannaCry Ransomeware” attack that swept the world on May 12th, 2017 in over 150+ countries worldwide. The article discusses how VMware’s NSX solution and its “Zero Trust” model could have helped those that were attacked mitigate this attack. This just proves how important it is that businesses consider using VMware’s NSX solution to help protect their environments from attacks in ways that other solutions can’t.

Product Announcements:

vRealize Automation (vRA) 7.3 –
- Release Notes: http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vra/73/vrealize-automation-73-release-notes.html?src=vmw_so_vex_akjaer_1025
- Documentation: https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vrealize-automation-pubs.html
User Environment Manager (UEM) 9.2 –
- Release Notes: https://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/uem/9.2/uem-92-release-notes.html?src=vmw_so_vex_akjaer_1025
- Documentation: https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/uem-pubs.html
VMware IoT Solutions Website –
- Website – http://www.vmware.com/products/pulse.html
- Blog – https://blogs.vmware.com/partner/2017/05/pulse-iot-center.html
Horizon Cloud (UPDATE) – Intent to deliver Horizon Cloud to Microsoft’s Azure cloud-based environment for the first time
- Blog – https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2017/05/horizon-cloud-microsoft-azure.html

Acquisitions:

OVH Acquisition of vCloud Air Closed on 5/8/17 –
- News Release – http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed.OVH-Announces-Intent-to-Acquire-VMware-vCloud-Air-Business.2153983.html
- Because of this, all Hands-On-Labs (HOL) labs related to vCloud Air labs have been removed from Partner University and the public facing Hands On Labs (HOL) site.
Apteligent (Analytics for the Digital Workspace) – https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2017/05/vmware-acquires-apteligent-app-performance-digital-workspace.html
Wavefront (Cross-Cloud Capability) – https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2017/04/vmware-acquires-wavefront.html

Latest Promotions/Discounts: http://www.vmware.com/promotions.html

New Promotion – User Environment Manager (UEM) 9.2
Updated Promotion- vRealize 25% Upgrade Promotions Extended to July 29, 2017

Security:

WannaCry Ransomware attack that attacks Microsoft operating systems swept the world on May 12th in over 150+ countries. Below is VMware’s response on how the NSX Zero-Trust model could have helped mitigate this attack using NSX. This is a great opportunity for you to drive how critical it is to use NSX and where other solutions couldn’t provide the same protection that we can from these types of attacks.
- Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/networkvirtualization/2017/05/use-zero-trust-protects-against-wannacry.html/

VMware Partnerships:

VMware and Pivotal Extend Strategic Alliance to Integrate NNSX and Pivotal Cloud Foundry –
- News Release – http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed.VMware-and-Pivotal-Extend-Strategic-Alliance-to-Integrate-VMware-NSX-and-Pivotal-Cloud-Foundry-to-Deliver-New-Developer-Ready-Infrastructure.2163618.html
VMware Introduces Integrations with Dell EMC to Accelerate Workforce Transformation –
- News Release – http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed.VMware-Introduces-Integrations-with-Dell-EMC-to-Accelerate-Workforce-Transformation.2163617.html
VMware & Google Announce Expanded Chromebook Partnership –
- News Release – https://www.vmware.com/radius/dell-emc-2017-chromebook/

VMware Partner Accreditation’s:

NEW VSP/VTSP- Server Virtualization Competencies –
- Server Virtualization Internal Presentation
- Server Virtualization External FAQ
NEW VSP/VTSP-Desktop competencies –
- Desktop Virtualization External FAQ
- Desktop Virtualization External Presentation

VMworld 2017:

VMworld US: Training & Certification Programs/Discounts – https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=100528&ui=www_edu

VMware’s Intent To Acquire Wavefront!

Posted on April 12, 2017 by Tim

VMware’s Intent To Acquire Wavefront!

As no surprise to me, VMware continues to look for ways to make VMware and its solutions better and keep up with the ever changing IT and business requirements of this brave new world. So VMware has announced its intent to acquire Wavefront who is a leading vendor in metric monitoring service born in the cloud.

It is clear to me that customers are responding enthusiastically to our Cross-Cloud strategy and our Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) team has a central role to play as we deliver a consistent operating environment across clouds. Our team is rapidly innovating for on-premises products while we also building out our Cross-Cloud management services including costing, discovery, monitoring, root cause analysis, and visualization. To accelerate our delivery for the cloud, today I’m excited to announce our intent to acquire Wavefront, the leading metrics monitoring service for companies born in the cloud era.

Wavefront already has an impressive list of customers, and their technology allows us to leapfrog into application management of next-generation modern applications. Together with vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight, we will now be able to analyze data and offer customers end-to-end operations management for both virtual and multi-cloud infrastructures.

Continue reading the rest of the blog announcement – Click Here!

Update vRA 7.0 to 7.2

Posted on March 23, 2017 by Tim

Update vRA 7.0 to 7.2 [bkdatacentre.com]

Update vRA 7.0 to 7.2

This post covers my update of vRA 7.0.1 to 7.2 in my lab. Compared to older versions this is getting really easy and while doing this in a production environment has additional complexity and consideration I created this post to highlight how far this process has come since version 5 days.

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vRealize Log Insight 4.5 is Now Live!

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vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 Now Live!

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vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 Now Live!

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Missed The Latest VMware Announcements In The Past Month?

Check Out This Summary!

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VMware’s Intent To Acquire Wavefront!

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Technical Sales 201 – What’s New in vRealize Business for Cloud (vRBC) 7.2.1

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Technical Sales 201 – What’s New in vROPs 6.5 Enablement Video!

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vRealize Operations Management Pack For vCloud Air 3.1 Is Now Live!

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VMware Releases (4) Updated Solutions From The vRealize Family On March 2, 2017!

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Sales 101 – VMware’s Cloud Foundation Overview:

Enablement Video

What Cloud Foundation Delivers

Next Generation Hyper-Convergence:

Radically Simple Operations:

Enterprise Class Capabilities:

Public Cloud Extension:

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VMware Partners – Promo Updates!