Hey Hey,
Released today we have vRealize 7.5, didnt feel like very long ago we got 7.4. This is a good thing to see rapid releases.
If you check out this post on Cloud Automation Services, you will start to see somethings aligning. The biggest in this release is the UI. At last we have a clarity based UI in vRA.
In this Post we will go through the major whats new in vRA 7.5. Starting from what I personally think is the most significant down to the not so significant.
Resubmit
Now most people will think the UI is the best change, for someone that has literally submitted hundreds of thousands of deployments in vRA, resubmitting a failed deployment with all the same inputs is a dream come true
UI
The team didn’t just re-skin vRA’s existing UI, the Catalog and Deployment tabs are net new. The others have been re-styled. You can see from the below images that the Catalog and Deployment tabs are now the same as Cloud Assembly. As such the items table and request tabs are gone and replaced by the deployment tab.
vROps Integration
vRA has had vROps integration for a while now, but it has been significantly improved in this release. vROps alerting and base metrics like CPU, Memory, IOPS and Network are available from within vRA.
vROps could be used to do initial placement of a VM, this has been extended to optimise workload placement day 2, taking a step forward into the Self-Driving Operations nirvana.
Searching
One thing vRA never really did well, was searching. This has been enhanced with a universal search capability which covers:
NSX-T
Yay, NSX-T OOTB support, it is no quiet feature parity with NSX-V but it is close. This means I can finally move my LAB to NSX-T.
PKS
vRA now has a unified container management, you can choose PKS, VIC or traditional Docker endpoint. vRA allow the ability to deploy, create and manage PKS clusters and discover existing and day 2 manage, looking forward to integrating with PKS.
Azure
Something many customer have asked me about, it is finally here, managed disk support for Azure, support for Azure Goc cloud and Germany was also added.
Blueprint Updates
Previously you could update a blueprint CPU, Mem and disk ranges and it would propagate to all the deployment of that blueprint. This has been increased to now propagate lease and Archive and well as cluster size.
EBS
Improvements to ebs has been added to stop WF execution, as well as added the ability to merge the output playload when a workflow is registered to a common lifecycle.
Ansible
You can now drag and drop an Ansible element onto you blueprint machine, just like you could do with puppet. the only downside to this is that you require Ansible Tower for this to work.
There is some other miner improvements and of course bug fixes.
Lab is upgrading now
Cheers