VMware, Inc. today announced advancements to its cloud management platform with the introduction of VMware vRealize Suite 7 featuring new releases of VMware vRealize Operations and VMware vRealize Log Insight along with VMware vRealize Automation 7 and VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7. The suite's new product updates together with pricing and packaging enhancements are designed to help customers readily address the most common use cases VMware has identified in customers' journey to the cloud.

Digitization is disrupting every industry and causing massive changes to traditional businesses and operating models. Organizations are responding by innovating with new online and connected customer experiences by leveraging big data, cloud computing and mobility. These companies are realizing new opportunities and revenue streams by taking on a modern approach to business enabled by technology.

"VMware is focused on delivering an enterprise-ready hybrid cloud management platform to help our customers gain a major competitive edge as a digital business," said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Management Suites Business Unit, VMware. "VMware vRealize Suite 7 is designed to meet our customers' strict requirements for day-one service provisioning and day-two operations of applications and infrastructure across multiple private and public cloud environments." 

Addressing Intelligent Operations, Infrastructure Modernization and DevOps Initiatives

The VMware vRealize Suite provides customers the ability to provision and manage at scale -- compute, storage, network and application services across hybrid cloud environments. The platform's comprehensive management capabilities for the software-defined data center help customers to address three common use cases based on thousands of customer engagements:

• Intelligent Operations Management: Enables IT teams to proactively address health, performance and capacity management of IT services across heterogeneous and hybrid cloud environments in order to improve IT service performance and availability.
• Automated IT to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Enables IT teams to automate the delivery and ongoing management of IT infrastructure in order to reduce the time it takes to respond to requests for IT resources by providing self-service access to those resources by IT and business users. 
• DevOps-ready IT: Enables IT teams to build a cloud for development teams that can deliver a complete application stack; support developer choice in the form of both API and GUI access to resources; and provision resources across a hybrid cloud. IT can further extend the solution scope by addressing continuous delivery with VMware vRealize Code Stream to further speed up application delivery.

VMware vRealize Suite: Purpose-Built for the Hybrid Cloud

The suite combines VMware's cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business management solutions into an integrated platform that enables IT to deliver unified services at the speed of business, but with the control and cost efficiency that IT requires.

VMware vRealize Suite 7 features new and currently available product releases:

• (New) VMware vRealize Operations 6.2 - VMware vRealize Operations 6.2 builds upon the intelligent workload placement capabilities originally introduced in Q3 2015 to help customers save time while enabling enhanced application and infrastructure performance. VMware vRealize Operations 6.2 will introduce new intelligent workload placement capabilities including tight integration with VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). 
• (New) VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3 - VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3 will introduce a number of backend and operational enhancements. This release introduces Simple Query API for easy integration into existing processes and Web Hooks support for third-party application integration. 
• VMware vRealize Automation 7 - VMware vRealize Automation 7 offers unified service blueprint capabilities that simplify and accelerate the delivery of integrated multi-tier applications with application-centric networking and security across clouds.
• VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7 - VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7 (formerly vRealize Business Standard Edition) increases transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services on-premises or in the public cloud.

VMware Introduces New vRealize Suite Standard Edition

VMware today introduced a new Standard Edition of the vRealize Suite. This new edition includes all of the capabilities necessary to address intelligent operations management for infrastructure. It delivers management analytics that address health, performance and capacity management across all infrastructure domains of a heterogeneous, hybrid cloud. It also includes log analysis capabilities. The VMware vRealize Suite is also available in Advanced and Enterprise Editions.

All VMware vRealize Suite editions are hybrid in nature. VMware today also introduced the Portable Licensing Unit (PLU) to offer VMware vRealize Suite customers the flexibility to manage workloads regardless if they run on VMware vSphere, third-party hypervisors, physical servers or on supported public clouds such as VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, all without licensing switching or conversion.

Supporting Quotes

"VMware vRealize Suite is the ideal solution to help us deploy and manage our hybrid cloud environment," said Coby Holloway, vice president and service line director for cloud computing technology and business transformation, SAIC. "VMware's cloud management platform has enabled us to monitor and automate our systems as well as helped us to manage costs along the way."

"We made the strategic decision to take a hybrid cloud approach to meet the need for greater IT agility at our company," said Scott Myers, manager of cloud services, Zebra Technologies. "VMware vRealize Suite enables us to deliver IT-as-a-Service offerings to our developers and Lines of Business at the right time and at the right cost."

Pricing and Availability

VMware vRealize Operations 6.2 is now available. VMware vRealize Suite 7 and VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3 are expected to become available in Q1 2016. VMware vRealize Suite 7 will be made available in three editions: Standard ($3,745 per Portable Licensing Unit or PLU), Advanced ($6,245 per PLU) and Enterprise ($7,745 per PLU).