VMware cloud-management suite features Kubernetes, automation upgrades

VMware this week bolstered the on-premise and service-monitoring capabilities of its core cloud-management software with improved automation, Kubernetes and troubleshooting features.

The features come in a new release of VMware’s vRealize Suite which is the company’s wide-ranging package of tools for helping customers manage virtual infrastructure and applications. Its features include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and DevOps tools such as Infrastructure as Code to provision, orchestrate, optimize and govern hybrid-cloud environments.

“The overarching idea of vRealize is to help customers centrally control and govern cloud resources whether they be private, hybrid or SAAS and mitigate the risk of those rapidly growing virtual workloads,” said Ken Lee  senior director of product marketing for VMware. 

Some of the key enhancements for vRealize include upgrades to its vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation components which individually offer virtual troubleshooting and automation management for VMware customers.

In the new, Version 8.2 release vRealize Operations, VMware has added support for Kubernetes containers running on VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid or IBM/Red Hat OpenShift environments.  In addition, a new self-service provisioning for Kubernetes software is also available to help bring up and manage those resources quickly.

Another vRealize component, Log Insight which enables real-time monitoring of application logs, network traces, configuration files, messages and performance data, was also added to the  Kubernetes support menu.

The idea is to help customers auto-discover and monitor the health, performance, capacity, cost, and configuration of Kubernetes containers, Lee said.

This release of software also includes integration with popular application-performance management tools such as Cisco/AppDynamics, Datadog and Dynatrace that will let customers integrate application availability, performance and troubleshooting metrics with VMware vRealize Network Insight package to help customers predict, prevent and remediate application issues from a central location, Lee said.

Also in the Operation package is improved metric-correlation and near real-time cloud resource monitoring that will help customers detect performance and availability issues up to 15 times faster than previous versions of the software, Lee said.  Enhancements to native AWS management will unlock capacity calculations for AWS EC2 instances and automatically import metrics into VMware vRealize Operations for faster troubleshooting, he added.

On the automation side, the company boosted security by adding support for granular role-based access control and added support for improved network automation routines to help customers configure and manage virtual network environments via their NSX package. NSX is VMware’s flagship networking package that supports everything from private or public cloud-native applications to bare-metal workloads  running on multivendor hypervisors. It also supports network-virtualization stacks in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud as well as leading Kubernetes container technologies.

All of the VMware vRealize enhancements will be available in the third quarter, the company said.