vRealize Operations 8.6 – What’s New?

During VMworld2021 VMware announced vRealize Operations 8.6 which will provide a lot of new features and capabilities. We can expect enhanced integration between vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation, an exciting new user interface for smoother navigation, new public cloud integrations and many more like support for defining custom email notices within the user interface or new methods to define customer groups.

For me one of the highlights of that release was the inclusion of vRealize True Visibility compute and storage management packs for all editions, and new sustainability-related dashboards.

Let’s have a look what is coming:

Updated Product Navigation UI

The simplified user interface creates a smoother navigation experience with enhancements like dashboard favorites, a new administration page and support for regular expressions in custom groups.

In-app Guides for vRealize Operations Cloud

In-app Guides will provide easy to follow instruction to get user to start faster with tasks like connecting to vSphere or VMware Cloud, setting up alert notifications or creating dashboards. With these self-guided tours, you can see a fast time to value.

True Visibilty Compute an Storage Management Packs

vRealize Operations 8.6 will include all storage and compute management packs that are currently part of vRealize True Visibility Suite. No additional license key will be required to install and configure these management packs

Users will be entitled to all packs listed below with the next release of these management packs:

Compute	Storage
Cisco UCS	Cohesity	HPE Nimble
Dell EMC PowerEdge	Dell EMC Isilon	IBM SVC & Storwize
Dell EMC OpenManage Enterprise	Dell EMC PowerMax & VMAX	NetApp E-Series
HPE ProLiant	Dell EMC VNX	NetApp FAS/AFF
HPE OneView	Dell EMC XtremIO	NetApp SolidFire
Lenovo Compute	Dell EMC Unity	Pure Storage FlashArray
	HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Email Payload Templates

With better control over what information is portrayed in email alerts, teams can react faster to situations that need immediate attention. The templates can be created using HTML editor. User can define support parameters for alert properties, metrics along with custom inputs.

Enhanced integration for vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation

The feature will enable vROps to manage multi-cloud vRA deployments on Azure, AWS, Google or even on Edge. vROps will be able to monitor the deployment, performance, health and utilization. The feature also will allow to check the cost of the vRA objects for public and private cloud environment.

Increased integrations for public cloud

Once we are talking about deployments on public cloud, it is worth to mention that vROps 8.6 will include support for monitoring ALL AWS services including custom metrics. Furthermore all across the public cloud with new object summary pages for AWS to deliver business critical information in a condensed view, support for more Azure and Google Cloud Platform services, revamped object relationships as well as a native Management Pack for Google Cloud Platform.

Enhanced management pack for CloudHealth

With vRealize Opretaions 8.6 management pack for CludHealth received bi-directional integration. Meaning instead sending data from CloudHealth into vRealize Operations only, now with this update you can take SDDC or VMware Cloud data from vRealize Operations and send it to CloudHealth. Furthermore for the users who want to compare information about costing in multi-cloud environment, the bi-directional integration will be available on both on-prem and SaaS.

Welcome to Open Source Telegraf Agent

Thanks to support of the Open Source Telegraf Agent, you can monitor over 200 applications. Of course one can still continue to vRealize Operations Telegraph agent but it will limit you to 30 or 40 application. While using Open Source Telegram Agent its plugin ecosystem for hundreds of applications will give more options. This feature supports monitoring both virtual machines and physical servers.

Sustainability Dashboard

vRealize Operations 8.6 will help you stay green! The new Sustainability Dashboard will help to optimize infrastructure from the environment viewpoint by reviewing the physical servers, storage and network infrastructure. Optimize their power efficiency. Review the virtual machines and files, making sure they are genuine demand that still serve business purpose.