Welcome to the news for vRealize Automation (vRA) Resource Center. I’m excited to share the revolutions around IaaS resource manageability that we’ve been working on and are available in vRA cloud and on-premises release.

Following the release of Resource Center in May, we continued to listen to our users. Some users leverage simple cloud templates and heavy Day 2 operations, while others have complex cloud templates and simple Day 2 operations. We also found that manageability on the resource level is useful for the cloud end users’ persona – cloud administrator customers who set up cloud templates. We want to bring more to Cloud Resource Center to help enhance the vRA experience.

We hope to help our customers throughout the cloud journey, regardless of their environment and structure. Cloud Resource Center will help both greenfield and brownfield customers in the first experience setting up with vRA to manage resources from all backgrounds. We also added a create vm feature to quickly create virtual machines without having to use VMware Cloud Templates.

Here’s a brief over view of Resource Center with the upgrades we added in this release.

A few highlights

To add dimension to resources, we moved compute, networking and security resource pages to a more prominent space in the UI. Although each company might have different architecture, certain patterns of resource usage are shared. A cloud end user who only cares about virtual machines can remain in that page without navigating back and forth.

We also added more insights to the origin of resources whether it was deployed, onboarded, or discovered in order to better track the history. The filters are easily distinguished. We added this new design to indicate which filters are applied.

I’m excited to share that we can enabling Day 2 actions for discovered machines in Resource Center. This is a milestone for our team to help customers with immediate value in vRA. Upon configuring cloud accounts, resources are discovered by vRA, and users can take day 2 actions on discovered machines immediately.

These new columns are also introduced to help give a better overview of the resources before the user has to use the details page.

New Virtual Machine page

Similar to “All Resources” page, we added columns that are more relevant for the Virtual Machines page.

Here is the new Details page for virtual machines. With the new arrow button, users can open an in-context details panel, without having to go to another page. The day 2 actions remain accessible under the second button.

You might have noticed the “New VM” action at the top. Yes – we now support creating a virtual machine without a VMware Cloud Template. To create a VM, this wizard below walks you through configuring project and cloud zone, then moves on with machine image and flavor, as well as storage and networking settings.

New Networking & Security page

You can see 4 new categories on top for “Networks, Gateways, Load Balancers and Security Groups” with the same details panel.

New Volumes page

The same design applies to Volumes page that shows list of disks, day 2 actions and details panel.

These are just parts of what we want to bring to our users. Stay tuned for more news! Please leave a comment for your thoughts below.