VMware has released new versions of there vRealize products

VMware has released new version of vRealize Lifecycle Manager, vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Business for Cloud, vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Automation, includung vRealize Orchestrator.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2

What's new:

• Install pre-checker allows you to validate the environment create requests before starting the deployment. Pre-validations include user input, infrastructure resource availability, and product-specific checks.
  
• Content lifecycle management allows you to manage the release automation of content such as vRealize Automation Blueprints, vRealize Orchestrator Workflows across multiple environments such as development, staging, production. It allows native source control management integration and dependency management between a cross-referenced content.
  
• User interface enhancements in the product settings and environment creation pages. Product binary mapping, environment creation using the configuration file, and grouping user input fields are some of the product pages that have been revamped.
  

See the full release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Suite/2018/rn/vRealize-Suite-Lifecycle-Manager-12-Release-Notes.html

vRealize Operations Manager 6.7

What's new:

Analytics Advancements:

• Predictive real-time analytics, that allow for continuous performance optimization of workloads based on business and operational intent, such as running gold clusters at 60% utilization.
  
• Software license optimization, that lets you optimize placement and balancing of workloads based on software license. For example, Windows VMs on Windows clusters, Oracle VMs in Oracle Cluster via tag based placement.
  
• New capacity overview, reclamation and planning UI workflows powered by new real time capacity analytics, resulting in quick time to value.
  
• Native cost visibility in capacity overview, reclamation and planning with cost comparison of adding workloads across different clouds including private cloud, VMware Cloud on AWS and Amazon. 
  
• Recommendation to densify clusters by consolidating workloads and freeing up ESXi hosts, allowing you to defer hardware purchases. 
  
• OOTB Allocation based Capacity dashboard to assess clusters with capacity risk based on how much capacity is allocated to the VMs. Cell coloring highlights which clusters by target Tiers are over-allocated and may be at capacity risk. 
  

Platform Improvements:

• 30% footprint reduction, lets you monitor more objects with the same footprint and better performance. Also  provides the options to shrink your installation to a smaller size.
  

Automated Agent Lifecycle Management to Enable Application Monitoring in Wavefront:

• vRealize Operations Manager Integration with Wavefront allows you to send the OS and Application metrics from a VM with an agent installed  to Wavefront via VMware Application Proxy.
  
• vRealize Operations Manager offers smart agent lifecycle management by discovering what applications services are installed on the VMs. It provides a simple user interface to automatically install Telegraf agent on multiple VMs with the ability to track install status.
  
• Telegraf agent supports monitoring a rich and diverse set of application services by collecting and sending the relevant metrics via VMware Application Proxy to Wavefront. This enables fast on-boarding of Wavefront for Enterprise Applications. For more information, see: VMware Application Proxy on VMware Solution Exchange.
  

User Experience Improvements: 

• New Quickstart page that lays out the key areas to launch into the functionality- optimize performance, capacity, troubleshoot or assess configuration
  
• Ability to customize the vRealize Operations Manager home page to something other than the default
  
• vRealize Operations Quick Start provides you functional based, easy to access workflows.
  
• New and simplified workflows are available to assess, optimize and plan capacity.
  
• Enhanced workflows for continuous performance optimization of workloads is possible by using workload rebalancing
  
• Richer visibility into vSphere DRS is available with simple configuration options.
  
• Smarter dashboard, widgets, and views are available with new colorized palettes and new data transformation capabilities such as percentile, conditional formatting, cell coloring, and so on.
  
• Color schemes can be changed to display the interface in dark theme.
  
• New compliance workflow is added for complete vSphere infrastructure compliance against vSphere Security Configuration Guide, PCI and HIPAA benchmarks.
  

Content Enhancements:

• New in-product videos provide step by step instructions on using the new workflows and features.
  
• New out of box dashboards are provided to optimize performance & cost.
  
• Enhanced vSAN dashboards with vSAN key performance indicators and costing capabilities are available. 
  
• Refreshed out of box reports cover multiple use cases of reporting health, performance, inventory, capacity, utilization, reclamation, and so on.
  
• Enhanced views and symptoms lead to simplified troubleshooting and analysis.
  
• Optimized metrics with new metric groups and quick metric descriptions are in the interface.
  

Changed and Deprecated Features:

This release of vRealize Operations Manager has capabilities that have been deprecated or changed in the areas listed below. Please carefully evaluate this list before you upgrade: 

• What-if planning scenarios to add capacity- this functionality has been deprecated, along with the ability to reserve capacity at a cluster level for a given project.
  New simplified What-if planning workflow has been added to forecast capacity shortfalls and compare costs across clouds when planning new workloads. These can be saved and rerun. 
  
• Several capacity metrics, sub-badges at an object level, OOTB views, dashboards and alerts have been deprecated. 
  New capacity analytics based simplified workflows, alerts and dashboards have been added and refreshed. There is a pre-upgrade assessment tool that can be run before the upgrade to evaluate & mitigate the impact to existing customer alerts and dashboards. For more details on the Pre-Upgrade Assessment Tool, see Running the Pre-Upgrade Readiness Assessment Tool and KB 53545.
  
• Option to calculate Capacity Remaining and Time Remaining based on demand vs allocation model has been deprecated. By default, the product shows capacity analytics based on VM demand. If latest version of VMware Tools are installed, the VM demand takes into account the memory metrics from within the Guest OS for increased accuracy. 
  
• Management Pack for VMware Configuration Manager has been deprecated. New simplified compliance pages and refreshed dashboards have been added to assess compliance against vSphere Security, PCI, HIPAA benchmarks.
  

Supported Management Packs: 

• The VMware Management Packs supported with 6.7 are:
  
  • VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for VMware vRealize Orchestrator 1.0
    
  • VMware SDDC Health Monitoring Solution 4.0
    
  • VMware OpenStack Management Pack 4.1 for VMware vRealize Operations
    
  • VMware vCloud Director 4.5 Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations
    
  • vRealize Operations Management Pack for Service Discovery 2.0
    
  • vRealize Operations Management Pack for NSX for vSphere 3.5.2
    
• The 3rd party authored Management Packs that are supported with 6.7 are listed in the VMware Compatibility Guide.
  

See the full release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Operations-Manager/6.7/rn/vRealize-Operations-Manager-67.html

vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4

What's new:

Enhancements to VMware Cloud on AWS Assessment

• Two new parameters, number of host failures to tolerate and failure tolerance method, are included along with vSAN metadata overhead and a recommended slack to increase the accuracy in calculating the effective available storage capacity.
  
• The operational insights are enhanced with information such as the number of VMs that can be packed in a host, and percentage utilization of host based on constrained resource.
  
• The latest list prices are considered for cost calculation for on-demand, one-year, and three-year plans.
  

Enhancements to Pricing and Chargeback Capabilities

• Storage policy driven pricing for vCloud Director infrastructure. You can apply rate cards for storage policies that are discovered by vCloud Director and have differential pricing for the storage tiers.
  
• Network enhancements
  
  • You can apply fixed one-time charge and daily recurring charge for data ingress and egress for each business unit or tenant.
    
  • You can apply fixed one-time charge and daily recurring charge for the used network bandwidth (MBps).
    
  • You can apply fixed one-time charge and daily recurring charge for the dynamic routing and distributed firewall services.
    
• You can define T-shirt sizes for the PAYG VMs based on your requirement and price the VMs based on the sizes instead of vCPU and RAM.
  
• You can apply a differential rate for the vCPU and RAM usage that is beyond the guaranteed resources (overage) for the allocation pool model.
  
• You can apply daily pricing for OS license consumption based on one of the following rules:
  
  • VM up time
    
  • VM is powered on at least once a day
    
  • Regardless of VM power up state.
    
• The storage elements such as media and template are discovered automatically and you can apply a rate card for the elements.
  
• You can get the following comprehensive information about vCloud Director usage and charge details when using the report APIs:
  
  • vCloud Director data at organization level
    
  • vCloud Director data specific to an organization
    
  • vCloud Director MTD and daily data at organization vDC level
    
  • vCloud Director data specific to an organization vDC
    
  • vCloud Director data at vApps level
    
  • vCloud Director data specific to a vApp
    
  • vCloud Director MTD and daily data at VMs level
    
  • vCloud Director data specific to a VM
    

Security Enhancements

• Updated multiple open source components to resolve CVE-2017-1000364, CVE-2017-1000365, and CVE-2017-1000367.
  

Important Information

• Before upgrading to vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4, you must read the KB article 2151835.
  
• If you are running a vRealize Business for Cloud 6.x.x version, a direct upgrade is not supported. You must first upgrade to vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3.1 and then upgrade to 7.4 release.
  

See the full release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Business-for-Cloud/7.4/rn/vRBforCloud-74-release-notes.html

vRealize Log Insight 4.6

What's new:

• Support for up to 15 vCenters per node.
  
• Added ability to send an alert when a configured log source stops sending log events after a fixed amount of time.  
  
• Added ability to export a full list of agents from the Admin->Agents page.
  
• Added ability to control the visibility of items on Dashboard widgets. Use Shift-Click  to toggle and Option/Alt-Click to show all.
  
• Added ability to search  for users on the admin/users page and to delete multiple users.
  
• Ability to  authenticate VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) local users.
  
• For SLES installations, product upgrade now updates base operating system libraries from SLES 11 SP3 to SLES 11 SP4.  This means that installations that are upgraded to this release, and installations from fresh deployments of this release have the same base OS libraries.
  
• Additional APIs including those for creating alerts,deleting VIPs, and authenticating with vIDM.
  
• Improved informational messaging when deleting VIPs with the API.
  
• Minor Improvements for PLU license representation on the license page.
  
• Support for receiving RAW event messages without headers.
  

vRealize Log Insight Agent Features

• Support for sending syslog over UDP.
  
• Importer support for bzip and bzip2 archiving formats.  
  
• Support for configurable compression for HTTP requests when an agent sends log events with the Ingestion API.
  
• Agent status now includes information about the server or servers it sends logs to.   
  
• Agents can now read logs from journald system service for log data in Linux distributions running systemd. 
  
• Ability to configure multiple destinations for an agent from the main configuration server. 
  

See the full release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Log-Insight/4.6/rn/vRealize-Log-Insight-46-Release-Notes.html

vRealize Automation 7.4

What's new:

Custom Request Forms Designer

When leveraging Custom Forms, designer blueprint architects are able to apply the following logic to the blueprint request form:

• Drag-and-drop controls and custom properties on the canvas
  
• Leverage blueprint schema – blueprint properties, custom properties, and profiles
  
• Use generated forms
  
• Save, clear, and revert customized forms
  
• Dynamically show or hide fields based on custom conditional logic
  
• Auto-fill and dynamically populate input values based on external and internal logic
  
• Use internal dependencies and external call outs with vRealize Orchestrator
  
• Apply constraints to input values
  
• Apply custom validation using regular expressions
  
• Apply custom help text and error messages
  
• Choose vRealize Orchestrator inventory objects
  
• Support for complex types like disk volumes and vRealize Orchestrator composite types
  
• Use advanced formatting and apply custom CSS to the blueprint request form
  
• Automatic form validation of blueprint definition during design time
  
• Export and import of customized form through GUI and CLI
  

For information, see Providing Service Blueprints to Users.

Deploy from OVF

• New provisioning option to deploy vSphere blueprints from an OVF or OVA​
  
• Specify URL to the OVF location with authentication and proxy options available
  
• Support for advanced configuration options in the form of custom properties specific to the OVF
  
• Support for parameterization with the image component profile
  

For information, see Configuring a Blueprint to Provision from an OVF.

See the full release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Automation/7.4/rn/vRealizeAutomation74.html

vRealize Orchstrator 7.4

See the release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Orchestrator/7.4/rn/VMware-vRealize-Orchestrator-74.html?src=vmw_so_vex_akjaer_1025