Kristof's virtual life

You should have heard by now that today VMware announced some new features and versions over their complete product line.
As a vExpert I had the privilege to join 3 exclusive blogger Early Access sessions where these announcements were pre-presented. In this blog I’m going to summarize some of these announcements.

1. Cloud automation and operations

Let me first start with the part I’m currently working most with and that’s mainly cloud automation. More specifically, I’m currently working on a private cloud project based on vRA 7.4. And boy let me say that I’m excited about some of the announcements.

vRealize automation 8.1

Yeah sorry I’m just REALLY excited.

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Multi-tenancy is now supported. This means I can start plan/think about upgrading my current 7.4 infrastructure to version 8.1.
There will be a migration assessment available in vRA 8.1 but there’s no automated migration tool (yet). There will be a process available to manually migrate towards the new version.

In vRA 8.1 you will hear more about Organizations instead of Tenants. And then each Tenant can have multiple Projects which were previously Business Groups.

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Other announcements for vRA 8.1 are:

• “View only” role for all services
• Custom resources. These allow you to define anything as a resource that can be used as part of a blueprint.
• Custom day 2 actions. You can create custom actions that can be performed as day-2 operations for any resource.
• You can now set resource limits for CPU / Memory / storage in projects. Projects can be compared to business groups in version 7.x
• Approval policies
• Ansible Tower Integration.

vRealize Orchestrator 8.1

Support for multiple scripting languages, how cool is this :-). You can now use PowerShell, NodeJs and python for tasks in workflows along the traditional java scripting language. No need for an extra PowerShell host to run those PowerShell scripts.
However this feature is only available with a vRA license. This means it will not be available if you just download vRO as a standalone version.

Tree view is back. If you’re used of working with vRO 7.x like myself, then you probably didn’t see this yet. However in courses, I’ve already worked with the HTML 5 client, and there you could only tag you’re workflows. So finding your workflows back wasn’t always efficient. Now with the Tree view that’s back we can put all our workflows again well organized in a folder structure.

Other announcements for vR0 8.1 are:

• Workflow versions are now date and time stamped. Giving you an even better overview of when workflows were created.
• Syncing workflows to different branches of a Git repository.

vRealize Operations manager & vRealize Log Insight 8.1

These products have been updated to make sure that all the new features are supported. The biggest thing here, is mostly linked to vSphere 7.0 with K8. This to make sure that all the kubernetes information is passed and visible in these products. So no major changes here.

2. Application modernization portfolio

VMware Cloud Foundation 4

On VMware cloud foundation a new layer “VMware cloud foundation services” has been added. The goal of this extra layer is to extend the platform directly to developers. This would allow VMware to introduce new services in the future, but also partners and customers could use this platform to introduce new services.

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You can see a more detailed overview of this layer on the below picture. Where you can see that it currently consists of two families:

• Tanzu Runtime Services: Delivers core Kubernetes development services, including an up-to-date distribution of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.
• Hybrid Infrastructure Services:Include full Kubernetes and RESTful API access that let you createand manipulatevirtual machines, containers, storage, networking, and other core capabilities

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vSphere with Kubernetes

Just like VMware had already announced when starting with Project Pacific, vSphere 7 will focus more on the integration of vSphere with Kubernetes. In the new version you will have the availability of namespaces. These namespaces represent the logical applications that runs on an environment. This will decrease the complexity of your infrastructure because instead of looking at a lot of several machines you’ll be looking at 10 – 15 different namespaces.

When you’re not working with Kubernetes then I didn’t see any major changes in the new version of vSphere 7. As working for IBM where we deploy OpenShift I don’t see any requirements to upgrade to this new version of vSphere.

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