VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 Released With New Features

VMware vRealize Automation is a hybrid cloud automation platform that transforms IT service delivery. With vRealize Automation, customers can increase agility, productivity, and efficiency through automation, by reducing the complexity of their IT environment, streamlining IT processes and delivering a DevOps-ready automation platform.

VMware vRealize Automation is one of the best automation tools in industry which allows users to request and provision infrastructure and application resources. The fundamental idea of vRealize Automation has been to eliminate manual, or semi-automated IT processes, through end-to-end automation with policy-based self-service.

VMware has announced its latest and major release of the VMware vRealize Automation version 8.0 with many new capabilities and improvements.

Main use cases of vRealize Automation 8.0.

• Cloud Management – You can build and consume a hybrid cloud environment across on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS.
• Multi-cloud Extension – leverage native public cloud services with governance.
• Application Delivery with DevOps – You can easily automate the application development lifecycle from end to end with release pipelines across a multi-cloud environment.
• Manage Kubernetes Workloads – Easy to deploy a virtual machine or container-based applications on any cloud and manage Kubernetes workloads with governance across a multi-cloud environment.

Key Features and Capabilities

Easy and fast to set up and manage

With new version easy Installer you can set up vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager, VMware Identity Manager and vRealize Automation. In addition, vRealize Automation 8.0 will be natively integrated with VMware SDDC, making it easier and richer to automate and manage the entire SDDC. And with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager, all the manual work of configuration, installation, and maintenance is taken care of for you.

Secure and compliant hybrid and multi-cloud platform

Fine-grained governance and resource guardrails will allow customers to define the team and project-based policies. These policies enable self-service provisioning of infrastructure and applications through a common catalog while maintaining security and compliance.

Consistent orchestration across the multi-cloud environment

Now Customers can model IT services as blueprints share them in the catalog. With new version blueprints can be cloud-agnostic and you will be able to deploy them on any cloud (private or public) based on pre-defined policies. In addition, you will be able to embed native public cloud services constructs into blueprints.

Speed up application delivery with a DevOps-friendly platform

vRealize Automation 8.0 will integrate with development tools and automate the release pipeline management, including visibility and analytics of active pipelines

What’s New with VMware vRealize Automation 8.0

VMware vRealize Automation version 8.0 has many new capabilities and improvements and the new version will greatly enhance the ability for its customers to deploy and manage multi-cloud environments.

New Architecture

Nowadays everyone focusing on containers and Kubernetes and the new vRealize Automation 8.0 platform is built on a container-based microservices architecture. This new architecture has dramatically simplified the management, configuration, and future upgrades of the environment.

Flexible Deployment

With this new architecture, scalability and performance of vRealize Automation are really improved and it has flexible deployment options. Previous versions of vRealize Automation required at least two virtual machines (VMs), including the need to run portions of the architecture on a Windows server and new version this is no longer required.

• With the new release, vRealize Automation 8.0 has underlying OS as VMware’s Photon and Windows Server is no longer required.
• Now you can run vRealize Automation services in a single Virtual machine with enough scale and performance for many customers.  And If additional resources and high availability required, vRealize Automation 8.0 supports a three-node cluster configuration, you can increase VM compute resources for improved scaling.
• You can easily complete the installation and initial configuration with deployment od compute and networking in under an hour.
• vRealize Automation easy installer is delivered as an ISO file with support for installation from Windows, Linux, or macOS.
• The built-in Marketplace includes numerous operating systems, applications, blueprint and image samples to kickstart the delivery of infrastructure and application resources in your environment.
• You can install vRealize Lifecycle Manager, vRealize Automation, and Workspace ONE Access directly from the easy installer for new deployments. Additionally, you can choose to leverage existing vRealize Lifecycle Manager and Workspace ONE Access installations in your environment to install and manage vRealize Automation 8.0 plus provide authentication.

Enhanced Integrations and Extensibility

New HTML 5 User Interface

vRealize Automation 8.0 is released with fully-featured new HTML 5 user interface and enhanced capability.

Multi-Cloud Management

vRealize 8.0 provides improved support and integration with VMware Cloud on AWS, native Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

API-first approach to deliver cloud automation

A powerful configuration and deployment API provides the ability to automate interactions with vRealize Automation.  Additionally, the new API expands integrations, workflow, actions, and art of the possible scenarios to an unprecedented level.

Easy to setup and consume multi-cloud infrastructure surface

With the vRealize Automation, 8.0 projects and Cloud Zones enhance and simplify governance by reducing the number of interfaces and actions required for configuration, unifies governance across clouds, and provides more control over where deployments happen.

Iterative development of blueprints

Blueprints are another core feature of vRealize Automation offering extensive flexibility when designing and deploying OS, application, and infrastructure resources. New blueprints options provide extensive granularity, including the ability to add cloud-agnostic objects.

Cloud Agnostic Blueprints

VMware Cloud Assembly to create a cloud-agnostic blueprint that can provision our infrastructure to the cloud of our choice as well as completely deploy and configure our application using cloud-init within the blueprint. This cloud-agnostic blueprint allows us to provision infrastructure and deploys the application to any public or private clouds with no extra configuration.

Deliver Infrastructure-as-Code using a declarative YAML syntax

With vRealize Automation 8 blueprints provide a declarative Infrastructure as Code experience using YAML with an improved easy to use drag and drop design canvas.

New Action based extensibility (ABX)

Action Based Extensibility (ABX) is a new option for vRealize Automation 8.0, which is an alternative to vRealize Orchestrator.  ABX provides serverless automated extensibility actions using Node.js or Python scripts that initiate via specific triggers.

vRealize Orchestrator Support

vRealize Orchestrator one of the core parts of vRealize Automation now runs as a service within the VM with end-to-end git integration.

More Details can be found on vRealize Automation 8.0 Release Notes

Download vRealize Automation 8.0

vRealize Automation 8 is available for download from VMware. Download now and play around with the new look check out new features

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