Announcing General Availability of VMware vRealize Automation 8.4

Announcing General Availability of VMware vRealize Automation 8.4

New, modern, event-driven infrastructure automation platform powered by DevOps principles and open-source innovation: VMware vRealize Automation 8.4 is generally available, scroll down to learn more!

Building and managing a multi-cloud environment to support the needs of IT admins, Cloud admins, DevOps, lines of business and developers is complicated. The infrastructure and application provisioning, configuration and Day 2 management are not fully automated, and teams face mounting pressure to manage the exponential rise in complexity and the growing need to standardize processes and technologies in order to increase control and governance.

To address these challenges and more, we are excited to announce the general availability of VMware vRealize Automation 8.4, the latest release of VMware’s industry-leading modern infrastructure automation platform.

With the new and enhanced capabilities in vRealize Automation 8.4, customers can rapidly implement self-service multi-clouds, DevOps-based infrastructure delivery, Kubernetes infrastructure automation, network automation and security operations. Customers benefit from increased scalability, speed, flexibility and reliability as they reduce the complexity of their IT environment, streamline IT processes and deliver a future-ready automation platform.

Key vRealize Automation 8.4 capabilities and enhancements:

• Apply an intelligent storage management. This latest release of vRealize Automation introduces support for multiple VMs and for disks in VMware Cloud Templates, in addition to a more optimized storage placement via datastore selection. Customers can benefit from improved visibility by identifying disks based on a specific order, applying day 2 actions and measuring performance via a SCSI controller assigned to each disk. They can increase optimization for storage placement to obtain cluster and datastore connectivity-based recommendations so all eligible datastores come under consideration and the least loaded datastore gets priority.
• Deploy workload onboarding enhancements. vRealize Automation provides an advanced workload placement across zones via support for multiple VMs/disks. Customers can add more granularity and flexibility by applying a smarter logic placement and allow each VM, and disk associated with it, to go through a separate logic. In addition, vRealize Automation delivers support for external IPAM, simplifies the onboarding workflow and provides visibility into onboarding actions to support the vSphere network interface.
• Leverage support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud enhanced provisioning. To align with customer practices and provide more efficient operations, vRealize Automation delivers enhanced public cloud provisioning support. For Microsoft Azure, customers can use existing availability sets, custom images from an Azure image gallery, create Azure disk snapshots and choose specific Azure disk encryption sets for different deployments. For Google Cloud, they can provision with sole-tenant mode to keep their VMs physically separated from VMs in other projects, or to group their VMs together on the same host hardware.
• Simplify self-service automation for VMware Cloud on AWS. Security group support for VMware Cloud on AWS is adding value for networking automation in VMware Cloud environments. With this capability, customers can control security group membership through VMware Cloud Template canvas, leverage existing and new, on-demand security groups and apply iterative and day 2 actions.
• Enable the vRealize Orchestrator plugin for vRealize Automation. The vRealize Orchestrator Plug-in for vRealize Automation deepens the integration between vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Automation, enabling customers to easily automate tasks in both vRealize Automation and vRealize Automation Cloud. By leveraging out-of-the-box workflows or creating custom workflows, customers can simply execute tasks in vRealize Automation on a larger scale and in a faster manner. Moreover, the plug-in can help connect vRealize Automation to a rich third-party ecosystem, integrating vRealize Automation with external systems.
• Apply third-party integration enhancements. With this release, vRealize Automation increases flexibility and usability for the Ansible and Puppet modules. It provides support for workflow templates and increased readability for hostnames registered in Ansible Tower and Open Source. For Puppet, it defines facts in VMware Cloud Templates and delivers support for PE master of masters. In addition, the enhancements for the ITSM integration with ServiceNow allow customers to view and consume vRealize Automation catalogs from the ServiceNow portal and service catalog, enable day 2 actions as catalog items and make deployment details available through a widget in the ServiceNow home page.
• Explore cloud management for highly regulated environments. VMware is dedicated to providing accessible experiences for users, and with this latest release, vRealize Automation is certified for the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) Standards. On the accessibility journey, VPAT joins Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) certifications.

If you are looking to dive deeper into vRealize Automation 8.4 and its new features, check out these technical blogs:

Learn More

To learn more about VMware vRealize Automation, here are some more resources:

• vRealize Automation Website
• vRealize Automation latest datasheet
• VMware vRealize SaltStack Config latest datasheet
• Five Strategic Automation Use Cases for Your Business
• Transform your IT with Self-Service Delivery
• Network Automation for Dummies Guide
• Follow us on Twitter @vRealizeAuto and give us a shout with #vRealizeAutomation and #vRA