VMware, Inc. announced innovations across its cloud management portfolio spanning CloudHealth by VMware and VMware vRealize Cloud Management on-premises and software as a service (SaaS) offerings. The new and enhanced capabilities will further enable customers to monitor, better secure, optimize, and automate their growing number of VMware Cloud and native public cloud services.

"Enterprises are adopting a multi-cloud approach for choice and flexibility but face the challenge of deploying, managing and better securing their apps across clouds," said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management, VMware. "VMware makes this complexity of managing clouds invisible. By providing consistent costing, security, governance, operations and service automation across clouds, VMware enables customers to achieve higher application and business agility."

Enhanced IT Agility and Accelerated Time-to-Value via Self-Service Multi-Cloud

VMware vRealize Automation 8.4 will deliver new and enhanced capabilities to support customers' needs for modern self-service multi-cloud infrastructure, intelligent network automation, and event-driven configuration automation. This new release will feature tighter integration with open source innovations from the Salt Project as well as advanced multi-cloud provisioning and governance across Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and VMware Cloud. Key features will include:

• Enhanced Public Cloud Provisioning Support: Will provide customers with enhanced public cloud provisioning support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. For Microsoft Azure, this release will include support for existing availability sets, custom images from an Azure image gallery, and Azure disk encryption sets. For Google Cloud, this release will support sole-tenant provisioning.
• Enhanced vRealize Automation SaltStack Config Integration: Powered by the Salt Project, customers will benefit from simplified installation, set-up, and deployment of vRealize Automation SaltStack Config via tighter integration with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.
• Expanded Network Automation with NSX-T Migration Support: Will further help NSX customers to simplify and accelerate migrations from NSX for vSphere (NSX-V) to NSX-T environments via the enhanced vRealize Automation Migration Assistant tool.
• Enhanced Self-Service Automation for VMware Cloud on AWS: VMware vRealize Automation Cloud integration with VMware Cloud on AWS will enable VMware Cloud on AWS customers to activate vRealize Automation Cloud with a single click and help automate the setup of the necessary cloud resources. Customers will also be able to use vRealize Automation to automate VMware Cloud on AWS security groups.

Improved Multi-Cloud Operations via Increased Support for Clouds and Apps

Powered by AI and predictive analytics, VMware vRealize Operations 8.4 delivers self-driving operations from apps to infrastructure to better optimize, plan and scale private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. New and enhanced features include:

• Increased AWS Services Support: vRealize Operations will dramatically expand coverage of the most popular native AWS services-supporting 57 total services going forward-helping customers further automate and simplify operations of those services.
• Enhanced VMware Cloud on AWS Costing: Will enable customers to calculate the cost of their VMware Cloud on AWS VMs and clusters using their VMware Cloud on AWS bills. This includes running reports and tracking the potential savings of reclamation from powered off VMs, idle VMs, VM snapshots, orphaned disks, and oversized VMs. Additionally, customers will benefit from the ability to produce a single dashboard spanning VMware Cloud on AWS and on-premises VMware vSphere costs.
• Enhanced Cost Flow Optimization: This major update will provide cost flow guidance to customers helping them improve their cost efficiency. With 10 new dashboards, customers will improve and visualize costs, including return on investment, total cost of ownership, potential cost savings, and more.
• New VMware Cloud on AWS What-if Planning: Will enable customers to predict demand, plan for future capacity needs and get actional insights with new capacity planning capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS. The new features will include the ability to assess the capacity utilization trends, understand how soon they will run out with time remaining, and the cost impact of adding or removing VMs from an existing VMware Cloud on AWS environment.
• New Support for Open Source Telegraf Agent: Will expand the ways customers monitor their apps by enabling them to pull metrics from any app using any of the open source Telegraf agent plugins or by developing their own. Plus, customers will be able to monitor these apps anywhere-whether they are running in a VMware environment or on bare metal servers.

VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.4 and vRealize Log Insight Cloud will introduce efficient storage partitions and extensive multi-cloud observability capabilities. The new Log Partitions as rules feature will help segregate data into specific partitions - "active" for regular high-performance data storage and "archive" for low-cost data storage. The new release will feature multi-cloud observability across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform logs (in addition to prior support for 50+ AWS services).

Optimized Application Discovery with Machine Learning for Migrations

VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.2 and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud provide an end-to-end network view by learning from multiple data sources across virtual and physical infrastructure. Using machine learning (ML) for application discovery as well as assurance and verification capabilities, vRealize Network Insight makes it easier for customers to plan, build, and manage complex networks. This new release includes:

• Improved Network Visibility for VMware Cloud on AWS: Will enable network visibility of intra-SDDC Groups and AWS Transit Connect traffic flows to help customers to better measure and optimize network performance.
• VMware Cloud: New network visibility for both Google Cloud VMware Engine and Azure VMware Solution will provide users with more capabilities to correlate application performance across more multi-cloud environments.
• Machine Learning Flow-Based Application Discovery: Will help IT staff efficiently prepare for migration planning by dynamically grouping VMs whether in the cloud or on-premises into applications groups as well as discover application boundaries. This enhancement will be newly available for vRealize Network Insight (on-premises) customers and improved for vRealize Network Insight Cloud (SaaS) customers.
• Enhanced Assurance and Verification: Will deliver usability and scale improvements for business intent validation and help enable a more proactive network.

Extending Rich Cost Reporting Experience to Microsoft Azure

CloudHealth is a leading multi-cloud management platform that simplifies financial management, operations, and strengthens security and compliance. CloudHealth FlexReports now supports Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreements (EAs) so customers can select both Azure EA and AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) to evaluate costs using various dimensions and filter criteria. CloudHealth has further deepened its support for AWS Savings Plans with the introduction of automated recommendations. Once customers build a savings plan quote, they can automate the savings plan purchase using the CloudHealth Platform. Beyond the Compute Savings Plan recommendation, customers can explore different Compute Savings Plan commitment level scenarios and see how they might play out in their environment.

Expanded Proactive Issue Avoidance for VMware NSX-T, vSAN and More

To further help customers avoid problems before they occur, VMware Skyline will deliver new proactive Findings and Recommendations, enhancements to Log Assist and in-product email notification.

• New Proactive Findings and Recommendations: Additional Findings and Recommendations for VMware vSAN, vSphere Virtual Volumes and NSX-T.
• Log Assist Enhancements: Improved UI to help enable successful automated support log bundle transfer to VMware Technical Support and segment tracking for a number of hosts and objects selected in a particular log transfer.
• Enhanced Email Notifications: Inclusion of Organization ID and Organization Name in login inactivity notification emails to alert customers to the specific Skyline organizations that have not been logged into recently.

Product Availability

The new capabilities and enhancements to CloudHealth by VMware, VMware vRealize Automation Cloud, VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud are available. VMware vRealize Automation 8.4, VMware vRealize Operations 8.4, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.4, VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.4, VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.2 and VMware Skyline are expected to be available in VMware's Q1 FY22 (ending April 30, 2021).