In what I hope is great news, I have extended my SDDC series into another three posts covering the snazzy announcements presented during VMware’s VMworld conference in Barcelona, Spain. We’ll begin with what’s going on with vRealize Suite 6.0, and then move on into some of the fun times around vRealize Operations (formerly vCenter Operations Manager or vCOps) and various integration points between the two.

vRealize Suite 6.0

There were many cries of angst over the new naming changes announced at VMworld 2014 US. It’s a name; I really don’t care about it much. But I do think that it’s important that the naming is properly coupled to what is being offered in such a way that it is communicated clearly and transparently. The vRealize naming was a bit bumbled around in San Francisco with many attempts to later clarify. Here, let’s just look at this graphic, instead:

When I saw this graphic, many things clicked a bit. Essentially, all ties to the word vCenter (or even just Center) were removed. This makes sense: many of these tools are going to look at management objects beyond VMware’s vCenter. Unfortunately, the vCloud name still invokes a bit of confusion, since vCloud Director has been demoted to the world of service provider obscurity – and many SPs opted to roll into a different cloud management platform, instead – or legacy implementations that aimed for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or something that looked and felt that way. After all, one of vCloud Director’s biggest strengths was the networking automation processes.

And so, vCloud Suite remains your on-premises based cloud deployment, also pointed out to be a private cloud. vCloud Air is the rebranding of vCloud Hybrid Service, the public cloud side. vRealize Suite is the one ring to bind them. Make sense? Maybe? We’ll see.

vRealize Suite 6.0 specifically folds together these product announcements, with GA forthcoming later this quarter:

• vRealize Operations 6.0 (formerly vCenter Operations Manager or vCOps)
• vRealize Log Insight 2.5
• vRealize Automation 6.2 (formerly vCloud Automation Center or vCAC)
• vRealize Business Standard 2.0 (formerly IT Business Management or ITBM)
• vRealize Business Advanced / Enterprise 8.2 (formerly IT Business Management or ITBM)

Getting SaaSy

I do like the idea of SaaS-ifying various VMware offerings for various use cases. Especially vCAC, which is a beast to install and configure under its current iteration from its DynamicOps roots. If you’re looking to buy an as-a-Service version of any of VMware’s products, look for the word Air to be inserted after vRealize. vRealize Air Automation, for example, would be an Infrastructure as a Service … Service … and would include the service catalog, IaaS delivery, policies, governance, and workflow automation – but it is no longer your problem to get it working.

Alternatively, vRealize Automation could be reborn as a distributed application with app-level clustering and such (gasp!), but that’s much harder than sticking it into a managed service. 🙂

Thoughts

I still view VMware’s cloud products to be a bit rough around the edges, although I’ll give a kudos to the team for showing renewed focus on a long term goal. The past 18 months of floundering around has been painful to witness.

The vRealize Automation platform needs to be designed with increased simplicity and availability in mind before I’ll venture back towards those murky waters. As a hint, this means not requiring a load balancer for any component within the stack and creating a cloud-like platform that can handle scaling itself or healing from failure. Additionally, it would be nice if the architecture felt like more various internal business units were working in collaboration on the platform rather than being after thoughts.