vRealize Operations 8.1 - What's New
Simon Eady
VMware have been very busy in the last few months across many of their products and Operations Management has not gone untouched. We saw glimpses of things to come late last year and now we see the Cloud Management Team in VMware really ramping things up with vRealize Operation 8.1
vRealize Operations Cloud
One of the bigger items to arrive very shortly is vRealize Operations Cloud (SaaS), this means you do not need to worry about standing vROps up in your environment to see what value it can bring to your infrastructure monitoring. It has the same feature set and UI as the on-premises offering.
If you are already using vRealize Automation Cloud you can integrate it with that also.
There is Native Integration with the following.
- vRealize Automation Cloud
- vRealize Log Insight Cloud
- VMware Cloud on AWS
- Skyline Advisor
As I understand it you can trial vROps Cloud for 30 days (for free)
vRealize Operations 8.1
I am certain it has not escaped your attention that vSphere 7 is just around the corner and that VMware are highly invested in Kubernetes. vROps 8.1 gives you immediate support for vSphere with Kubernetes, in the following screen captures you can see to what extent vROps now supports the new vSphere Features.
vROps 8.1 Environment Tab has been updated
You can also utilize vROps powerful Capacity Management features
A very elegant Unified dashboard for the inventory. relationship and KPIs has been included.
Also included in the support for vSphere 7 (Kubernetes) in the vROps 8.1 release are the following items.
- Workload Management Dashboard
- Workload Management Reports
- Workload Management Alerts (OOTB Alerts for Pods and Supervisor Clusters)
- A new Container Management Pack (for Kubernetes), so even if you aren’t running vSphere 7 but have Kubernetes you can now effectively monitor those Cluster, Nodes, Pods and Containers.
Multi-Cloud Monitoring
Also in this new release of vROps 8.1 there is native support for monitoring VMware Cloud on AWS. This will give you the following really useful features and functions.
- VMC Dashboards
- VMC Cost Overview (to help you better manage your costings and usage)
- VMC Networking Overview (NSX-T) - VMC and Policy Manager API Support
- Enhancements to the Public cloud migration planning feature
Amazon AWS with new AWS Objects
- Subnet
- EFS
- Elastic Beanstalk
- Direct Connect Gateway
- Target Group
- Transit Gateway
- Internet Gateway
- Elastic Network Interface (ENI)
- EKS Cluster
Support for the Google Cloud Platform.
- Compute Engine
- Container Engine
- Cloud Storage and Data store
- Firebase
- Cloud VPN
- Cloud Functions
- ML engine
- Cloud Billing
- Cloud Logging
- Google Cloud Traffic Director
There is now also Cloud Health Integration for GCP
- Any Slice and Dice of MTD in vROPs using “Perspective” sync from CH
- GCP Cost collection
- OOTB Cost Dashboards for GCP
What else?
- DISA and CIS Compliance Packs have been refreshed.
- New VxRail Management Pack
- Integration with vRNI
- Support for vVols
- Rate Card based pricing for vRA 8.1 Managed VMs
- Newly redesigned vSphere Optimization Assessment
Summary
With every release the Cloud Management Team in VMware keep improving and refining vRealize Operations Manager. I have long been a fan of the product and I am glad my faith in the product feels well placed as it keeps goes from strength to strength. The level of effort put in by the team to fill gaps while also endeavoring for feedback from their customers is really quite impressive.
If you have not yet checked out vROps you don’t even have to have it deployed in your environment anymore. Why not check out the SaaS offering? It is clear vRealize Operations is a product VMware take seriously and it is continuing to take a center place in their monitoring and management strategy.