Today at VMworld 2014 Europe, VMware, Inc. announced a wave of new cloud management offerings and capabilities including updates to VMware vRealize Suite 6, a cloud management platform purpose-built for the hybrid cloud. VMware today also unveiled a major update of VMware vRealize Operations (formerly VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite), the new VMware vRealize Code Stream to enable DevOps teams to deliver frequent, reliable software releases, and the beta launch of VMware vRealize Air Compliance, a new addition to VMware's family of cloud management software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

IT organizations today face a mix of conflicting priorities. IT must improve speed and agility to ensure success with new mobile, social, big data and web-scale applications. But also maintain control to ensure security, compliance and efficiency managing traditional IT systems. On top of that, IT is also tasked with managing both modern application architectures as well as traditional three-tier business applications that are both deployed on-premises or in the public cloud. Lastly, roles and responsibilities are shifting to address this increasingly complex mix. To address the multiple challenges IT organizations are facing, VMware introduced the vRealize Suite, a cloud management platform with a shared service model that delivers a unified management experience with fast time to value.

"CIOs and IT organizations are seeking greater agility without sacrificing security, efficiency and cost," said Ramin Sayar, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. "IT infrastructure and development teams are being asked to account for managing multiple private and public clouds, incorporating newer frameworks such as OpenStack along with adopting continuous delivery of new and modern applications and DevOps processes. VMware vRealize Suite presents enterprises with a single solution to manage through and capitalize on the wealth of IT choices available to them with the requisite agility and control."

"VMware's vision for the vRealize Suite aligns perfectly with our IT mission," said K. Chris Nakagaki, Sr. Systems Engineer, AutoTrader.com. "We are focused on transforming our service delivery capabilities while truly partnering with our developers to drive the business forward. By standardizing on VMware's cloud management platform we can now proactively manage and monitor our on-premises systems to achieve high performance, and have positioned ourselves to adopt a hybrid cloud model over time."

"We call ourselves the Payment Distribution Experts, and we are committed to continuously develop our NxPay technology to offer clients and their customers multiple global remittance options in a fast, secure and compliant environment," said Jonathan Bowman, CTO, Nx Systems, Ltd. "As we accelerate our international expansion, VMware's cloud management platform will help us automate operations management of our payment platforms while minimizing development and deployment time. Today, VMware solutions enable us to deliver new applications and services to market faster, more efficiently, with greater control and scalability."

VMware vRealize Code Stream 1.0 Enables Continuous Delivery Solution for DevOps
To help IT support agile development and DevOps processes, VMware is introducing vRealize Code Stream. VMware vRealize Code Stream will accelerate application releases and extend the agility provided by continuous integration to continuous delivery by enabling frequent, reliable software releases while reducing operational risks. The solution will automate the entire software release process and enforce governance across release stages. It will provide a single dashboard for end-to-end visibility of the release process across Dev and Ops teams. VMware vRealize Code Stream will integrate with build, continuous integration and source control tools such as Jenkins, Bamboo, Git, Subversion and others. Customers will be able to deploy application environments using VMware vRealize Automation starting, for example, with a public cloud development environment and later deploying in a secure, highly available production pod in a private cloud.

VMware vRealize Suite Delivers Unified Management Experience
VMware vRealize Suite combines the capabilities of VMware's cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business management solutions into a single offering. It delivers a comprehensive and integrated management stack for automating the release and operational management of traditional and new cloud applications deployed on private and public clouds, multiple hypervisors, and physical infrastructure -- all with a unified management experience. A shared service model simplifies common tasks, reduces the need to switch between management tools, and gives admins a powerful user experience.

VMware is advancing its cloud management platform with significant new and improved product capabilities including:

• VMware vRealize Operations 6.0 -- Intelligent Operations from Applications to Storage
  VMware vRealize Operations 6.0 will provide intelligent operations management across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures using predictive analytics and policy-based automation. VMware vRealize Operations 6.0 is a major product release featuring a new scale-out, resilient architecture that will be eight times more scalable than the previous release, and adapt to the needs of all customers from SMBs to global and distributed organizations. With an open and extensible platform, it will provide comprehensive visibility in a single console across applications, network and storage devices.
  
  The new release will introduce advanced analytics, smart alerts and problem detection capabilities to identify complex issues from multiple systems ahead of time, and suggest a resolution to the problem. Suggested resolutions include an embedded link to initiate policy-guided remediation enabling IT teams to address issues from a single console. VMware vRealize Operations 6.0 will also include new capacity planning and project management capabilities that extend beyond VMware vSphere to include physical and application-level metrics to better manage demand, available resources and service level agreements (SLAs).
  
  Learn more about VMware vRealize Operations 6.0 here.
  
  
• VMware vRealize Business 6.0 -- Empowering IT with Cost and Quality Insights
  VMware vRealize Business (formerly VMware IT Business Management Suite) provides transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services enabling CIOs to align IT with the business. Building on recent enhanced cloud comparison capabilities, including VMware vCloud Air costing and the ability to manually add any service provider, VMware vRealize Business 6.0 will further empower infrastructure and operations teams with business management capabilities essential for managing a hybrid cloud. The new functionality includes pricing analysis, showback/chargeback and budgeting for infrastructure services out-of-the-box, delivering users an intuitive decision-making experience. Additionally, new releases of VMware vRealize Business 8.2 Advanced and Enterprises are being announced.
  
  
• VMware vRealize Automation 6.2 -- Enhanced Platform Integration with vRealize Operations
  VMware vRealize Automation (formerly VMware vCloud Automation Center) provides the agility businesses need by automating the delivery of IT services and applications. This latest product release will offer increased product integration and shared services with VMware vRealize Operations. The enhanced integration adds operational intelligence and analytics to optimize cloud lifecycle management. VMware vRealize Operations 6.2 will add visibility of service health badges and identification of idle machines in multi-vendor infrastructures. This will allow VMware vRealize Automation's policy-driven workflows to verify if resources are still needed before reclaiming and reusing underutilized and idle capacity to improve resource usage and facilitate capital savings. 
  
  Additionally, VMware vRealize Automation's integration with VMware NSX will address a major problem -- which is the ongoing management and provisioning of virtual networks and services such as load balancers and security policies. Blueprints will incorporate network and security policies tying them to applications whether for deployment, reinstantiation or migration. When an application is decommissioned, VMware vRealize Automation will reclaim network services and does away with security policies and firewall rules. Thus, admins will not be left wondering about the hundreds of firewall rules and security policies, many of which are detritus from long-dead applications.
  
  
• VMware vRealize Log Insight 2.5 -- New Role-based Access Control Capabilities
  VMware vRealize Log Insight (formerly VMware vCenter Log Insight) delivers real-time log management featuring machine learning, high performance search and troubleshooting across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Enhanced integration between VMware vRealize Log Insight 2.5 and VMware vRealize Operations will enable organizations to combine and analyze both structured and unstructured data for end-to-end operations management to help them improve overall IT performance and avert disruptions. This latest release will introduce role-based access control capabilities that will enable customers to control access to log data based on organizational function.
  
  

VMware continues to grow its partner ecosystem aggressively resulting in the development of several new content and management packs. In Q4 2014, VMware and its partners are expected to deliver new content packs for the most popular networking gear as well as management packs for OpenStack and storage devices addressing iSCSI and NFS protocols (in addition to SAN) as well as VMware Virtual SAN. Dozens of content and management packs are available today in the VMware Cloud Management Marketplace to help customers simplify and automate the management of hybrid cloud environments.

VMware vRealize Air Compliance: New Beta Software as a Service Offering
VMware today also announced the beta of VMware vRealize Air Compliance, the industry's first SaaS compliance service built for the software-defined data center. With VMware vRealize Air Compliance, customers can be up and running within minutes assessing their VMware vSphere® environment against a variety of security and regulatory requirements including the vSphere Hardening Guide and HIPPA/HITECH guidelines for the Healthcare industry. With continuous compliance scans, customers can quickly address their configuration compliance challenges with automated compliance scorecards that provide real-time information and alerts on non-compliant changes all the way up to the user level. This new offering will provide all the flexibility customers need to enable the security of their on-premises and public cloud environments based on vSphere infrastructure.

Organizations interested in participating in the VMware vRealize Air Compliance beta program can learn more at: http://vrealizeair.vmware.com/compliance

VMware Completes vRealize Family Rebrand
As of today, VMware brings together all new and existing cloud management products under a single family name -- vRealize. The rebrand highlights VMware's commitment to helping its customers realize the value they expect from their IT investments, and help them fulfill their journey to the hybrid cloud.

Pricing and Availability
The new and enhanced cloud management solutions are expected to become available in Q4 2014. 

• VMware will update all the components of the VMware vRealize Suite which is available in two editions: Advanced ($6,750 per CPU) and Enterprise ($9,950 per CPU).
  
  
• VMware vRealize Code Stream will be made available standalone and priced at $1,250 per Operating System Instance (OSI) or $7,500 per CPU.
  
  
• VMware vRealize Air Compliance is now available in beta, which customers and partners can sign up for at: http://vrealizeair.vmware.com/compliance. Pricing for VMware vRealize Air Compliance will be announced at general availability.
  
  
• VMware will also update both the operations and log analytics components of VMware vRealize Operations Insight, an add-on to VMware vSphere with Operations Management. VMware vRealize Operations Insight is licensed on a per-CPU model starting at $2,000. To be notified when VMware vRealize Log Insight 2.5 is available for download, sign up at: http://eepurl.com/3FUsr .