VMware enhances multi-cloud support features

VMware has added new capabilities to its portfolio of multi-cloud management solutions to give customers greater flexibility and more tools for monitoring, securing, optimizing and automating their applications across multiple clouds.

The new capabilities span the VMware vRealize Cloud Management offering the CloudHealth by VMware offering. The company has been beefed up it vRealize offering in recent months through the acquisition of SaltStack, while VMware acquired CloudHealth in 2018. 

“Enterprises are adopting a multi-cloud approach for choice and flexibility but face the challenge of deploying, managing and better securing their apps across clouds,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management, VMware, in a press release. “VMware makes this complexity of managing clouds invisible. By providing consistent costing, security, governance, operations and service automation across clouds, VMware enables customers to achieve higher application and business agility.”

Drawing on features from VMware vRealize Automation Release 8.4, the company is aiming to provide customers with self-service multi-cloud infrastructures that feature intelligent network automation and event-driven configuration automation. The self-service features mean that  customers will benefit from single-click activation of vRealize Automation Cloud and use vRealize Automation to automate VMware Cloud on AWS security groups.

The SaltStack acquisition has resulted in what VMware described as tighter integration with open source innovations from the Salt Project, which the acquired company’s platform is based on. That will translate to easier set-up, and deployment of vRealize Automation SaltStack Config via tighter integration with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager, the company said.

RELATED: VMware to acquire software automation vendor SaltStack

VMware also is improving its multi-cloud provisioning support for user of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud through the vRealize Automation release. Google Cloud users will gain support for sole-tenant provisioning, while Azure support features include support for existing availability sets, custom images from an Azure image gallery, and Azure disk encryption sets. 

In addition, another software release - VMware vRealize Operations 8.4 - uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to enable self-driving operations from apps to infrastructure to better optimize, plan and scale private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This will translate expanded support and more automated operation for 57 native AWS services, VMware said. Customers also will benefit from VMware Cloud on AWS Costing, as well as cost flow optimization and “what if” planning. The latter will help customers predict demand and plan for and act on future capacity needs by analyzing usage trends and gaining a better understanding how soon capacity will run out.

Also featured is new support for Open Source Telegraf Agent, which will allows customers to use open source plug-ins to pull monitoring metrics from any app, and monitor these apps anywhere, whether they are running in a VMware environment or on bare metal servers.

Meanwhile, VMware also said in its announcement that a new release of VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.4, along with vRealize Log Insight Cloud, will introduce efficient storage partitions and extensive multi-cloud observability capabilities across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms. Also, VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.2 and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud will leverage multiple data sources across physical and virtual network infrastructure to provide end-to-end network visibility for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Among even more new support features, the CloudHealth multi-cloud management platform with grant Azure users new cost-reporting capabilities. CloudHealth FlexReports now supports Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreements, enabling users to choose both Azure EA and AWS Cost and Usage Reports to evaluate their costs using various dimensions and filter criteria. CloudHealth also has further deepened its support for AWS Savings Plans with the introduction of automated recommendations.