News

VMware Updates Its Cloud Portfolio

The company adds a new DevOps product, Code Stream, and rebrands its cloud management suite.

• By Keith Ward
• 10/17/2014

VMware Inc. makes most of its big announcements at its U.S. VMworld show, and that was the case again this year. But that doesn't mean there were only leftovers for VMworld Europe, held Oct. 13-16 in Barcelona. Headlining news from that show was a raft of announcements that reveal the company's increasing push into the cloud market, in all three key areas: public, private and hybrid.

The big announcements were updates to the vRealize Suite, the VMware hybrid cloud management platform first unveiled at the U.S. show last August in San Francisco. The suite covers cloud automation, management and operations in one package. vRealize Suite 6.0 includes updates to several products along with a new one -- vRealize Code Stream 1.0.

vRealize Code Stream
Code Stream is a DevOps offering that automates software release processes and enforces governance across release stages, according to a VMware press release. It works with source code repositories like Git and has a dashboard for both developers and admins, providing "end-to-end visibility of the release process."

Also updated is vRealize Operations 6.0. This was formerly named vCenter Operations Management Suite (which many shortened to vCOPS), and is part of the company's effort to drop "Center" from its branding strategy, as virtualization blogger Chris Wahl pointed out. vRealize Operations claims to have much greater scalability -- up to eight times greater -- and provides unified management across vSphere and other domains, including Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

vRealize Operations 6.0
VMware explains in a blog post that vRealize Operations has three core capabilities: intelligent operations, policy-based automation and unified management. Intelligent operations basically means predictive analysis and alerts, along with recommended fixes, for system issues. Policy-based automation allows the prioritization of operational activities at the Group level, for creation and application of custom policies for specific workload types, applications or clusters.

The unified management component of vRealize Operations is for visibility across both applications and infrastructure, including storage. It's meant to support complex environments with failover and replication.

Automation
Another upgraded -- and renamed -- product is vRealize Automation 6.2. In its former life, this was known as VMware vCloud Automation Center, or vCAC. It works with vRealize Operations, and VMware says "the enhanced integration adds operational intelligence and analytics to optimize cloud lifecycle management."

vRealize Automation also works with VMware NSX, its software-defined networking (SDN) product. One advantage, claims VMware, is that as network and security configurations change over time, vCenter Automation "will reclaim network services and does away with security policies and firewall rules," cleaning up the network by eliminating the baggage from extinct applications.

Log Analysis
VMware also renamed vCenter Log Insight, branding it vRealize Log Insight 2.5. It offers log management, fast searching and troubleshooting across physical, virtual and cloud environments. As with vRealize Automation, vRealize Log Insight is integrated with vRealize Operations. New features of Log Insight 2.5 include role-based access control capabilities, giving granular control over who has log data access.

Pricing and Availability
VMware says the vRealize Suite will be available by the end of the year, and will cost $6,750 per CPU for the Advanced version, and $9,950 per CPU for the Enterprise version. Code Stream will be available as a standalone product, and cost $1,250 per Operating System Instance (OSI) or $7,500 per CPU.