Today vRealize Automation 7.3 was released, VMware’s solution for self-service provisioning, automation & orchestration. Although it’s a point release some interesting enhancements are included in this release.
Let me summarize some of the stuff I particularly like:
- T-shirt sizing, yes it’s finally there! Out-of-the-box support for standard VM sizes that include number of CPU, amount of memory and storage;
- Trigger approval policies on size or image conditions, also an option I was looking for;
- You can now optimize placement of VMs deployed by vRealize Automation. vRealize Operations is used for this;
- The control of NSX load balancers is improved. There are some other improvements in regards to NSX as well, such as: enhanced NAT port forward rules, security group and tag management, automated HA for Edge services and Edge size selection;
- Another nice addition is the Puppet integration. Puppet, a configuration management tool, is now treated as a first class citizen. Earlier this year Puppet already released a new vRA/vRO plugin. Now the integration gets even better. You can drag and drop Puppet configurations directly on to the vRA design canvas. Puppet is now configured as an endpoint directly in the vRA interface;
- Check out GitHub for some good vRA REST API examples.
- Enhanced vRealize Business for Cloud integration. Some improvements here. Maybe you noticed that pricing in vRA and vRB was different. With vRA 7.3 pricing is consistent across vRA and vRB :).
- vRA 7.3 introduces a new health service, so you can get a quick overview of the health status of your vRealize Automation implementation;
- Another nice addtion: force destroy. Now you don’t have to go into the database the remove VMs after the initial destroy operation went wrong. I like this one.
- You can now drop software components onto an Azure VM in the design canvas, this was not possible with the first release of the Azure support in vRA 7.2 (there was no software component support for Azure VMs);
- vRealize Orchestrator control center interface now supports RBAC as well, so you don’t specifically need the root account for this one;
Wait there’s more…the release notes are published here, so read on if you want to learn about all the available improvements!
