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VMware just released most of the products announced at VMworld 2018

VMware decided to release many of the products announced at VMworld this week, and that’s a lot!

  • vRealize Suite 2018
  • vRealize Automation and Orchestrator 7.5
  • vRealize Operation Manager 7.0
  • vRealize Operations Plug-in for Horizon 6.6.0
  • vRealize Log Insight 4.7
  • NSX-T Data Center 2.3
  • vRealize Network Insight 3.9
  • Horizon Cloud Service
  • vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.0
  • VMware Identity Manager 3.3

vRealize Suite 2018

What’s New:  VMware vRealize™ Suite is the complete cloud management solution, delivering and managing infrastructure and applications quickly while maintaining IT control.  It provides a comprehensive management stack for IT services on vSphere and other hypervisors, physical infrastructure and multiple public clouds.  Install vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager first to simplify your deployment and on-going management of the vRealize products.  The vRealize Suite BOM currently includes:

  • vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.0
  • vRealize Operations Manager 7.0
  • vRealize Business for Cloud 7.5
  • vRealize Log Insight 4.7
  • vRealize Automation 7.5

Documentation and Links:

 

vRealize Automation and Orchestrator 7.5

What’s New:

Modernized UI and Consumer UX:  vRealize Automation has a new look and feel and streamlined flows for common self-service tasks.

  • UI updated to VMware Clarity standard
  • Larger catalog cards show more of the description
  • Cleaner catalog view
    • Multiple instances of the same catalog item across business groups are now rolled up; the user selects the business group at request time
  • Items and Requests tab merged into new Deployments tab
  • Request details for decommissioned resources moved to the Administration tab
  • Improved status of in-progress requests
  • History view shows all requests associated with a single deployment over time
  • Improved search capabilities across product menus and objects
  • Contextual access to documentation from the product UI
  • Home page and portlets are deprecated in this release
  • Save button on requests is deprecated in this release

Improved Integration with vRealize Operations:  This release introduces deployment dashboards for application owners and enhancements to intelligent workload placement capabilities via integration with vRealize Operations.

Configuration Automation Framework:  Native integration with external Ansible Tower configuration management tool.

  • OOTB support for Ansible Tower as first class citizens in vRealize Automation
  • Drag and drop Ansible Tower object in the Blueprint design canvas
  • Parameterize and support early and late binding/request time
  • Dynamically select Ansible job templates, including playbooks, for application configuration
  • Support Day 2 actions to register or decommission machines.  For information, see Create an Ansible Endpoint and Add an Ansible Component to a vSphere Blueprint.

NSX-T Data Center Native Integration:  vRealize Automation now has native integration with NSX-T Data Center.

Microsoft Azure Blueprint Enhancements

Install, Upgrade, Migrate, and Patching Improvements – For more information, see Installing or Upgrading vRealize Automation.

Troubleshooting Improvements

  • Improvements to Force Delete/Re-Submit (failed/orphaned deployments)
  • Post-migration validation
  • Consistent log tracing across solution
  • Expose trace-id to the vRealize Orchestrator plug-in API

vRO database clustering and configuration

  • vRO database configuration moved to vRA VAMI
  • Embedded vRO database (Postgres) is now able to be clustered and supports failover

Custom Forms Improvements:  For more information about custom forms, see Customizing Blueprint Request Forms.

Event Broker Improvements:  For more information, see Define Workflow Subscriptions Details and Assigning a Workflow to a Subscription.

Internationalization:  For more information about product language support, see the VMware Product Globalization Guide.

vRealize Orchestrator 7.5

What’s New:  vRealize Orchestrator 7.5 introduces a number of improvements, bug fixes, and extends the automated configuration with new options:

  • With the updated Orchestrator Client you can:
    • Run and re-run workflows
    • Monitor performance data and real time tracking of the workflow execution
    • Import and export packages
    • Create and edit scheduled workflows
  • Introducing a new method of the internal Postgres database clustering and migration vRealize Orchestrator through the VAMI interface
    • Database configuration is moved to VAMI
    • The embedded Postgres database is clusterable and supports failover
    • Join and remove cluster nodes operations are moved to the VAMI
  • Troubleshooting
    • Export vRealize Orchestrator plug-in configuration with log bundle
    • Inspect inputs and outputs of the nested workflows after run is completed
    • The API to get filtered list of script actions by datatype given

 

Documentation and Links:

 

vRealize Operations Manager 7.0

What’s New:  The vRealize Operations Manager 7.0 release focuses on performance optimization, capacity management, and intelligent remediation with the support of multiple clouds, additional compliance support, and enhanced Wavefront integration. Here are the key features and capabilities:

Continuous Performance Optimization

  • Fully automated workload balancing across clusters based on business intent, such as utilization, compliance, and license cost.
  • Integration with vRealize Automation for initial and ongoing workload placement. You can visualize vRealize Operations Manager alerts and metrics in vRealize Automation. You can visualize KPIs for each workload in the deployment.
  • Host-based placement to automate DRS, based on business intent and workload placement within a cluster.

Efficient Capacity Management

  • Real-time predictive capacity and cost optimization.
  • Right-sizing workloads and reclaiming capacity.
  • Multiple what-if scenarios to add workloads, procure hardware, and to migrate workloads to the cloud.

Intelligent Remediation

  • Support of multiple clouds such as SDDC, AWS, and VMware Cloud on AWS.
  • Support for PCI, HIPAA, DISA, CIS, FISMA, and ISO Security.
  • Enhanced Wavefront integration for application operation.

Simplified Dashboard Creation and Sharing

  • Simplified dashboard creation with an intuitive canvas and multiple out-of-the box widgets.
  • Easy dashboard sharing and embedding to improve cross team collaboration and reporting.

 

Documentation and Links:

 

vRealize Operations Plug-in for Horizon 6.6.0

What’s New: 

  • vRealize Operations Manager 6.7 support: vRealize Operations for Horizon is now fully compatible with version 6.7 of vRealize Operations Manager.
  • Horizon 7.6 support: vRealize Operations for Horizon now supports Horizon 7.6.
  • App Volumes 2.14 support: vRealize Operations for Horizon now supports App Volumes 2.14.0 and 2.14.2.

Download Links:

 

Release Notes (EN)

Documentation Links:

 

vRealize Log Insight 4.7

What’s New:  Support has been removed for the vRealize Log Insight for vCenter Server capability for version 4.7 of vRealize Log Insight.  You can continue to use vRealize Log Insight for vCenter Server for vRealize Log Insight version 4.6 and earlier versions that are under general support.  vRealize Log Insight standalone is unaffected.  See https://kb.vmware.com/kb/55980 for more information.  This release also includes new features for the vRealize Log Insight server and agent and a new location for REST API documentation.

vRealize Log Insight Server Features

  • Enhanced certificate management capabilities
  • Upgrade to Apache Cassandra version 3.11.2
  • Increased security for Apache Cassandra.  See https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/57901
  • Internationalization of numbers, percent, and date information
  • Optimization on vSphere integration and UI improvements

vRealize Log Insight REST API

vRealize Log Insight Agent Features

  • Added ability to provide SSL CA path as an     environment variable (LIAGENT_SSL_CS_PATH)
  • Added ability to list multiple directories in the same file log section
  • Added compression of rotated log files of the vRealize Log Insight agent

Product Download

 

NSX-T Data Center 2.3

What’s New: NSX-T Data Center 2.3 is the incremental upgrade release that enhances the new multi-hypervisor platform delivered for cloud and containers.

The following new features and feature enhancements are available in the NSX-T Data Center 2.3 release.

Introducing NSX-T Data Center Support for Bare-Metal Hosts

Bare-metal support includes Linux-based workloads running on bare-metal servers and containers running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor. NSX-T Data Center leverages the Open vSwitch, to enable any Linux host to be an NSX-T Data Center transport node.

  • Bare-Metal Server Support: includes native compute workloads running RHEL 7.4, CentOS 7.4, and Ubuntu 16.0.4 operating systems to allow users to network bare-metal compute workloads over VLAN, overlay backed connections, and to enforce micro-segmentation policies (stateful Layer 4 enforcement) for Virtual-to-Physical and Physical-to-Physical communication flows.
  • Bare-Metal Linux Containers Support: runs Docker Containers using Kubernetes and RedHat OpenShift Container Platform on bare-metal Linux hosts with RHEL 7.4 or RHEL 7.5.

NSX Cloud Enhancements

  • Support for AWS Deployments: NSX Cloud support for AWS workloads.
  • Automatic NSX Agents Provisioning in Azure VNETs
  • VPN Support Between On-Premise to Public Cloud: includes built-in VPN capabilities within the NSX Cloud Public Cloud Gateway using APIs. You can use the VPN capabilities to create IPSEC links between the following:
    • Managed compute Amazon VPCs/Azure VNets and third-party service VMs in transit Amazon VPCs/Azure VNets
    • Managed Amazon VPC/Azure VNET and an on-premise VPN device
  • Expanded OS Support for NSX Cloud Agent: NSX Cloud supports RHEL 7.5 operating systems in the public cloud.

Security Services Support

Introducing Service Insertion at the Routing Tiers

  • Service Insertion Support on Tier-0 and Tier-1 Routers: includes the ability to onboard third-party security solutions, deploy a High Availability third-party security solution at Tier-0 or Tier-1 or both and insert the third-party security solution via redirect policy.
    Check the VMware Compatibility Guide – Network and Security for the latest certification status of third-party solutions on NSX-T Data Center.

Distributed Firewall Enhancements

  • Multiple Section Support in NSX Edge Firewall: adds multiple sections in the NSX Edge Firewall for ease of manageability
  • Firewall Rule Hit Count and Rule Popularity Index: monitors rule usage and quick identification of unused rules for clean-up
  • Firewall Section Locking: enables multiple security administrators to work concurrently on the firewall
  • Grouping Objects: supports an object to be added to a group if it matches all five specified tags, which was previously two tags
  • Tag Length: increases tag length value from 65 to 256 and tag scope from 20 to 128

Network and NSX Edge Services Support

  • Overlay Support for Enhanced Data Path Mode in N-VDS: in conjunction with vSphere 6.7, the Enhanced data path mode in N-VDS for NSX-T Data Center 2.3 supports NFV style workloads requiring high-performance data path.
  • Support for Stateful NAT and Firewall Services on the Centralized Service Port
  • API Support to Clear All DNS Entries on DNS Forwarder: provides the ability to clear all the DNS cache entries in a single API call on a given DNS forwarder. This command is useful when a DNS server is giving wrong answers and to avoid waiting for the DNS entry timeout after the DNS server is fixed.
  • Load Balancer Enhancements
    • Support for Pre-Defined Cipher List:  Pre-defined SSL profiles for HTTPS VIP for higher security or performance.
    • Load Balancer Rule Enhancement: new Load Balancer rules, delete header action, SSL match condition, and Assign variable on match condition.
    • Load Balancer Support on Stand-Alone Service Router: provides the ability to deploy a load balancing service on a service router that does not have a router port.

User Interface Enhancements

  • New Language Support: user interface now available in English, German, French, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Spanish.
  • Enhanced Navigation and Home Page: new home page highlights search and at-a-glance summary of the system.
  • Enhanced Search: search includes type-ahead suggestions, which are accessible from the home page.
  • Network Topology Visualization: provides the ability to monitor communications from group-to-group, VM-to-VM, and process-to-process. You can visualize relationships between network objects such as, logical switches, ports, routers, and NSX Edges.

Operations and Troubleshooting Support

  • Install and Upgrade Enhancements
    • NSX-T Data Center in a Stateless vSphere Environment: enables additional deployment options by providing support for stateless ESXi hosts that use vSphere Auto Deploy and Host Profiles. The feature support requires vSphere 6.7 U1 or higher.
    • Support for NSX Edge VM and Bare-Metal to Co-Exist in the Same NSX Edge Cluster: NSX Edge nodes VM and bare-metal can now exist in the same NSX Edge cluster to simplify the scaling of services hosted on the NSX Edge node, such as load balancer.
    • Modular NSX-T Data Center Upgrade: includes support for modular upgrade in the Upgrade Coordinator. You can upgrade only the NSX-T Data Center components that have changed in the new release version. This added functionality reduces the operational overhead of patching an NSX-T Data Center version.
  • Monitoring and Troubleshooting
    • ERSPAN for KVM Hypervisor: includes support for port mirroring on KVM – ERSPAN Type II and III.
    • Use Traceflow to and from Tier-0 Logical Router Uplinks: provides the ability to generate traceflow traffic from the Tier-0 logical router uplinks and report the receiving of traceflow packets on Tier-0 logical router uplinks to simplify the troubleshooting operations to include the northbound interfaces of the NSX Edge nodes in traceflow reporting.
    • CLI Support to Shut Down DPDK Ports on Bare-Metal Edge Node: provides the ability to shut down a port claimed by DPDK on the bare-metal NSX Edge node to simplify port isolation during installation and troubleshooting operations.

Automation Support

  • Ability for the Neutron Plugin to Provision Overlay Logical Switch Backed by Enhanced Datapath: NSX Neutron plugin offers the ability to leverage Enhanced Data Path mode for overlay, which used to be VLAN only. With this supports you can take advantage of the Enhanced datapath performance in addition to the OpenStack environment for instance, for the NFV related workload.
  • Support for Co-existence of NSX Products with OpenStack: NSX Neutron Plugin now supports managing both NSX Data Center for vSphere and NSX-T Data Center simultaneously for an OpenStack implementation.
  • Ability to Consume VPN as a Service Feature in OpenStack: support for OpenStack VPNaaS in the Neutron extension in OpenStack that introduces VPN feature set.

NSX Container Plug-in (NCP) Support

  • Concourse Pipeline to install NSX-T Data Center
  • Annotation for Load Balancer SNAT IP: SNAT IP for a load balancer is annotated in a Kubernetes service of type LoadBalancer, ncp/internal_ip_for_policy: <SNAT IP>, and added to the service’s status, status.loadbalancer.ingress.ip: [<SNAT IP>, <Virtual IP>]. This IP can be used to create network policy which allows this IP CIDR.
  • Kubernetes Network Policy Enhancement: provides the ability to select pods from different namespaces with Kubernetes network policy rules.
  • Kubernetes Load Balancer/SNAT Annotation Improvement
    • If NCP fails to configure a load balancer for a service, the service will be annotated with ncp/error.loadbalancer.
    • If NCP fails to configure an SNAT IP for a service, the service will be annotated with ncp/error.snat.
  • Session Persistence of NSX-T Date Center Load Balancer for Kubernetes Ingress and OpenShift Routes
  • Cleanup Script Enhancement

 

Documentation and Links:

 

vRealize Network Insight 3.9

What’s New:  Here are the key features and capabilities of vRealize Network Insight 3.9:

NSX-T Support Enhancements

  • Support for NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) generated IPFIX flows and firewall rule recommendations to the micro-segmentation applications.
  • Support for VM-VM path and VM underlay path for VMs for the VMs managed by NSX-T.

Pin board Enhancements

  • Increased the maximum number of supported pin boards to 500.
  • Single step process of creating a pin board and adding pins.
  • Share pin boards with other users.
  • View existing pin boards in the pin board library.
  • Timeline controls within pin boards.
  • Customize the pin board titles and pin names.

Auto-Refresh

  • Pin boards and Entity dashboards can auto-refresh with configurable timers.

Support for NSX DFW Universal Artifacts

  • The universal artifacts can be generated and exported for the Application and the Tier groups.

Improved Scale and Performance

  • Increased scale limits to 30,000 VMs and 10 million flows. Please refer to the System recommendations and Requirements section in the vRealize Network Insight Install Guide for recommended proxy and platform node sizes.

Documentation and Links:

 

Horizon Cloud Service

What’s New: 

 

Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure 

  • Additional Azure VM Types support for VDI and RDSH
  • Ability to use Azure Encrypted Disks for VDI and RDS Farms
  • Windows 10 1803 Support for VDI
  • Optimize an Image Imported from the Azure Marketplace
  • Ability to use existing Azure VNet Subnets when deploying a Node
  • Ability for Internal Unified Access Gateway Deployment
  • Automated deployment of VMware Identity Manager
  • Helpdesk session history for troubleshooting disconnected and logged off sessions
  • Self-Service Domain Reset – Ability to Delete Active Directory Configuration
  • Improved Error Reporting during onboarding

 

Horizon Cloud with Hosted Infrastructure

  • Option to Migrate Dedicated Desktops Between Assignments
  • Historical Session Data In User Card
  • New Active Directory Option for Automated Certificate Management
  • Default Limit of 2,000 Desktops Per Pod
  • Helpdesk session history for troubleshooting disconnected and logged off sessions
  • Console Access Option No Longer Available in Helpdesk Console [Beta Feature]

 

Documentation and Links:

 

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.0

What’s New:

  • Certificate Management
    • You can manage certificates used across vRealize product environments from a single place.
    • You can replace product certificates as Day-2 operation
    • Ability to specify certificates at both product and environment level
  • Support for Patching
    • Seamless mechanism to automatically discover and apply product patches.
    • You can view and download the audit history of patches applied at both product and environment level.
  • Content Management Enhancements
    • Support for vRealize Operations content – Support a first-class content with a dependency discovery for Dashboards, Reports, View, Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations, Text, Topology, and Resource Kind Metrics.
    • Support for deploying multiple contents – Ability to deploy multiple contents to respective endpoints in a single operation
    • Rich content filtering – Ability to filter content based on associated metadata such as tag, endpoint(s), content type, save and reuse filters.
    • Content Developer restricted to a read-only view of endpoints created by others. Release Manager roles will continue to have access over all endpoints.
  • Other Improvements:
    • Simpler process to onboard and subsequently manage existing product environments.
    • Support for deploying Windows machines from ISO or VM Templates as part of creating vRealize Automation instance.
    • Ability to import vCenter Servers in bulk.
    • Ability to import and update passwords in bulk on vRealize Network Insight data sources.
    • Notifications
    • Ability to filter and export user requests.

Documentation and Links:

 

VMware Identity Manager 3.3

What’s New: 

  • Enhancement to Identifier Based Login
  • Managed App Configuration to Disable the Remove Account Setting
  • Migration to Virtual App Collection
  • Better Error Messaging to Troubleshoot Horizon, Horizon Cloud, and Citrix Launch Failures through VMware Identity Manager
  • Diagnostics Improvements
  • Cluster Related Enhancements
  • Fault Resiliency Improvements
  • OpenID Certification
  • Support JIT Users for Group Based Policies
  • Administrator User SSO
  • Support for UDID in Subject DN
  • Set up Android Mobile SSO using the Configurator UI from the VMware Identity Manager console
  • On Windows Generate Cluster file using Configurator UI of group-based access policy.
  • Federating Access to Amazon AppStream 2.0 from VMware Workspace ONE

Documentation and Links:

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