Home > vCenter, vCOPS, VMworld > VMworld 2014 US: vCloud Automation Center Overview and Glimpse into the Future #MGT2175

VMworld 2014 US: vCloud Automation Center Overview and Glimpse into the Future #MGT2175

August 28th, 2014

Notes from a VM world session from VMware product managers Nikunj Nemani, Rich Bourdeau and Long Wang.

The session highlighted how the world now very much revolves around applications which are not easy things to manage and deliver in a fast moving cloud world. Apps are often delivered in very siloed manually processes that take forever to commission holding back the business from being able to deliver what they need. The session looked at how IT efficiency is being driven by cloud automation and management with vCAC.

Automation is the catalyst that empowers the SDDC and is the next major efficiency drive within IT.

2013 saw a product consolidation with vCAC 6.0 with a common self-service interface based on policy based governance with automated delivery (their words to play buzz word bingo!)

vCloud Automation Center is now called vRealize Automation which has been built to automate across multi-vendor and multi-cloud infrastructure.

There will be a vRealize Suite available in September consisting of:

  • vCenter Operations Management Suite
  • vCloud Automation Center
  • IT Business Management Suite Standasrd
  • vCenter Log Insight

The vRealize components will be available as an on-premises version as well as a SaaS offering through vCloud Air.

Existing New Name New SaaS
vCenter Operations Management Suite vRealize Operations vRealize Air Operations
vCloud Automation Center vRealize Automation vRealize Air Automation
IT Business Management vRealize Business vRealize Air Business

The overarching idea is a Unified Service Catalog for: Applications, Infrastructure, XaaS, Desktop

Be able to accelerate application deployment with multi-tier applications

vCAC extensibility with vCenter Orchestrator

Able to do public cloud cost comparisons between Private cloud, AWS, Azure using the IT Business Management product.

Went through some customer stories and how vCAC helped them reduce provisioning time and costs as well.

We looked into some future capabilities:

The vCAC roadmap has 4 themes:

  • multi-platform, multi-vendor provisioning
  • policy based provisioning and lifecycle management
  • DevOps solution
  • deliver anything as a eservice

Lots of emphasis with working with your existing environment and being able to integrate with many of the tools you already have but providing central management and governance.

Comprehensive Infrastructure Management with a pluggable infrastructure fabric

  • support for converged infrastructure with  VCE, FlexPod and IBM, HDS, Fujitsu
  • support for vSphere new features
  • seamless integration with NSX
  • support for storage profiles and policies
  • enhancements on other hypervisors
  • AWS enhancement (VPC, S3, EBS) and Rackspace
  • Advanced Hybrid Cloud Management, move on premises VMs cloud or the other direction
  • failover and cloud and failback for recovery
  • sync templates and blueprints across private and public clouds

Enhanced application delivery

  • Creating a unified blueprint model for every components and applications for authorising and management. This is not just for provisioning but for full application lifecycle management.

Automated Release Management

  • first foot into DevOps strategy.
  • end-to-end visibility across the release pipeline
  • integrate with existing tools
  • manage configuration drift
  • drive down cost by automating manual tasks
  • speed time to market
  • reduce risk through increased compliance 

    IT as a broker

  • shopping cart experience
  • ability to select multiple items in a single request
  • provides cost on shopping cart
  • single approval for whole cart
  • streamlined approval for complex out of the box health and compliance badges – 1st integration with vCenter Operations Manager
  • right sizing information from vCOps fed into vCAC with recommended reclamation
  • cost comparison for additional vendors
  • solutions exchange for vendor plug-ins which can be imported
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