What is new in VMware vRealize Automation 8.8

 

 VMware  has Announced General Availability of VMware vRealize Automation 8.8 as on April 28, 2022. With this release, VMware has provided several enhancements and new capabilities. 

This creates an opening, particularly for IT infrastructure and operations teams that maintain the needs of developers and DevOps engineers, to streamline IT delivery processes by embracing modern automation practices. Because the existing IT infrastructure processes have been too tightly coupled and too inflexible to maintain modern application development practices, developers have embraced public clouds and open-source tools without a lot of IT oversight. Therefore, modernizing IT processes with automation holds the key to empowering IT to drive innovation together with developers in a safe, compliant, agile, and scalable way.Key vRealize Automation 8.8 capabilities and enhancements include:

• Multi-level approvals. Enable customers to define an approval policy and provision workflows in their environments. This feature adds the ability to specify the level of approval when multiple policies meet approval criteria. This allows approvals to send out sequentially, requiring multiple approvals before a requested cloud template is deployed. Use cases include an administrative approval, followed by a finance approval, to ensure that a provisioning request follows all policies and is within budget.

• Custom naming. Allow admins to easily manage and automate multiple naming standards. vRealize Automation has completely evolved the original feature to offer a wide range of additional features included unique profiles based upon scope, unique increments, and patterns per resource type, configure increment settings, expanded properties for the format, and matching patterns to support additional unique counters specific to a property.

• Day 2 operations for vSphere with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters. Enhance automation by provisioning Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters to update the Kubernetes version, Tanzu Cluster VM classes and scale worker nodes.

• Change Owner Day-2 Action support for AD Group Users. Facilitate the change of a deployment owner to users belonging to AD groups, such as project administrator or project member. Following this enhancement, users can easily provide AD groups with access to vRealize Automation and move ownership between users.

• vRealize Lifecycle Manager support for vRealize Orchestrator. Enable vRealize Lifecycle Manager support for vRO lifecycle management, including vRO installation, configurations, upgrades/patching, import, day-2 operations, and API automation. This feature allows customers to upgrade their entire vRealize infrastructure through a single pane, including external vRO instances, which leads to a dramatically lower operational cost.

Key vRealize Automation use cases:

• Self-Service Cloud. Evolve your VMware data center to private or multi-cloud infrastructure based on VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cloud.
• Security Operations. Harness event-driven automation to deliver full-service, closed-loop IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.
• DevOps for Infrastructure. Enable a powerful Infrastructure as Code platform with support for infrastructure pipelining and iterative development.
• Kubernetes Automation. Automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
• Network Automation. Automate VMware NSX to enable faster deployment and complete lifecycle automation of traditional and modern applications.

Learn more about vRealize Automation 8.8 and its new features – please check out these technical blogs:

• Approval Policies in vRealize Automation
• Cloud Assembly Custom naming re-imagined
• What’s New in vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.8
• New vRealize Automation Reddit Community Channel
• New Learn vRealize Automation Sites