Kathy Gibson reports from VMworld in Barcelona – Intelligent networking is at the heart of the unified hybrid cloud.
So far the industry has failed to come up with an effective solution to connect the public and private clouds seamlessly, says VMware senior engineer Yanbing Li.
“This is going to change with VMware’s hybrid networking services that offer intelligent routing, strong encryption, WAN acceleration, VXLAn extension and direct connect.
“Everything is built in software, and VMware is the only company that can do that,” says Li.
VMware has launched its Cross-Cloud vMotion that underpins the company’s new hybrid networking services, with management provided by a unified hybrid cloud management suite.
The cloud management platform now includes VMware vRealize Automation 7, introducing unified service blueprint capabilities that will enable IT and DevOps teams to simplify and accelerate the delivery of integrated multi-tier applications with application-centric networking and security across clouds.
New unified service blueprints will enable the modelling of infrastructure, networks, security, applications and custom IT services including their relationships and dependencies within a graphical canvas.
This latest release is integrated with VMware NSX 6.2 to dynamically configure networks and micro-segmentation unique to each application modelled in the blueprint designer.
VMware vRealize Automation 7 blueprints will span the hybrid cloud featuring out-of-the box support for VMware vCloud Air and Amazon Web Services (AWS), including new support for VMware vCloud Government Service and AWS GovCloud, OpenStack Kilo, and VMware vSphere 6 Update 1. The unified service blueprints will be accessible through APIs or CLIs as code for textual and human readable authoring of blueprints by DevOps teams.
The new release of VMware vRealize Automation 7 will also greatly enhance extensibility through an Event Broker, which will allow new functionality without changing core code to preserve upgradability. It will also feature simplified consumer APIs for requesting and managing services.
Now featuring integration with VMware Identity Manager, the platform offers enhanced identity services including multi-factor authentication, SmartCard support, the ability to integrate with federated external authorisation services, and more.
In addition, VMware vRealize Automation 7 will introduce a dramatically consolidated architecture with simplified installation that will reduce deployment time by up to 37% for most configurations (compared to the previous release) to help IT organisations accelerate time to value.
Also announced today, VMware vRealize Business Standard 7 introduces several new and enhanced capabilities to provide IT teams with increased transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services.
The release features new costing and pricing policies for private and public clouds including VMware vCloud Air, AWS, and all other clouds supported by vRealize Automation. VMware vRealize Business Standard 7 also supports Microsoft Azure for easy, comprehensive private and public cloud cost comparisons.
The enhanced showback capabilities of this new release will enable IT to provide fine-grained cost reporting to the Line of Business including showback across private and public clouds, a clear month-to-date and monthly cost projection analysis, and costs grouped by business service to provide business context.
New planning and cost optimisation capabilities will visualise costs of used and remaining capacity by data centre, will allow modelling of new workloads, and analyse the impact on the remaining capacity or costs as well as quantify potential savings from reclamation opportunities.
