Live from VMworld 2014: A closer look at VMware vRealize

Also read: Live from VMworld 2014: Most important announcements summarized.

At VMworld 2014 VMware announced its new vRealize brand. vRealize is the new umbrella for all of VMware’s cloud management products and a very important part of VMware’s product portfolio. In my “Live from VMworld 2014: Most important announcements summarized” article I already mentioned the new brand, although it was not 100% clear what vRealize exactly is. Let’s take a closer look at what the brand offers.

vRealize focusses on three areas:

• Automation;
• Operations;
• Business.

The cloud management products sit between the infrastructure and application layer. vRealize products talk to your virtual infrastructure, physical infrastructure or cloud and can be used in small, medium and large environments.

The way vRealize products will be developed by VMware is different. The management products will all be available as both a vCloud Air based SaaS solution or as product which can be installed on-premises. New features will first be made available in SaaS offering and after that be released to the installable version of the product.

Renaming of existing VMware products to vRealize

With the introduction of vRealize, some of the existing VMware products will be renamed:

On top of this two new Suites are announced (both available Q3 2014, yes within the brand additional new suites are developed):

• vRealize Suite – Includes vCenter Operations Management Suite, vCloud Automation Center, IT Business Management Suite Standard and vCenter Log Insight;
• vRealize Operations Insight – Includes vCenter Operations Management Suite Advanced & vCenter Log Insight.

It will probably cost some time to get used to this new names, especially vCloud Automation Center has some history…from vCAC (pronounced vCAC) to vCAC (pronounced vCAKE), to vCAC (pronounced v-C-A-C) to….vRealize Automation.

Apart from the specific features in these ‘new’ vRealize products, I noticed a new interface for vCenter Operations Manager/vRealize Operations in the various demos at VMworld. The look of custom dashboards in vCenter Operations Advanced/Enterprise  used to be quite different compared to the interface of the vSphere WebClient. With the launch of vRealize Operations I think we can expect a more uniform interface.

Stay tuned through twitter for more news on vRealize and other VMworld 2014 news.