VMware Inc. today updated its popular vRealize suite of cloud management tools to help customers deploy and operate applications, infrastructure and platform services more consistently across on-premises data centers, the cloud and the network edge.

VMware’s vRealize suite is used by enterprises to manage and provision workloads such as compute, storage, network and application services at scale in hybrid cloud environments.

The platform provides management capabilities for software-defined data centers and multiple-cloud setups. That helps customers address three crucial business use cases, namely intelligent operations, automated information technology and DevOps-ready IT that combines development and operations staff for more efficient application development.

The vRealize suite is composed of several different products, including VMware vRealize Operations and VMware vRealize Automation. VRealize Operations is a tool that’s used to monitor, troubleshoot and manage the health and capacity of virtual environments, while vRealize Automation is an infrastructure automation platform that enables self-service multicloud environments. Together, these platforms are aimed at enabling self-driving operations for applications and infrastructure so customers can more easily plan and scale up private and hybrid clouds.

The latest versions of these tools have been integrated more closely with Vmware Tanzu to boost support for Kubernetes, which is used to manage software containers that host the components of modern, agile applications. VMware’s Tanzu portfolio is a set of tools developers can use to build and manage Kubernetes applications. By integrating these tools with vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation, users will be better able to auto-discover and monitor the health, performance, capacity, cost and configuration of these apps, the company said.

VRealize Operations and vRealize Automation have also been integrated with third-party app monitoring tools such as AppDynamics, Datadog and Dynatrace, while app discovery capabilities have also been added via an integration with vRealize Network Insight. Together, these new capabilities will help customers to better predict and prevent any issues with their apps.

Meanwhile, vRealize Automation gains new security capabilities such as granular role-based access controls and support for multitenant infrastructure. It also gets better “infrastructure as code” capabilities thanks to the introduction of VMware Cloud Templates as a new templating engine, VMware said. VMware templates are a perfect, model copy of a virtual machine from which an administrator can clone, convert or deploy more virtual machines.

VMware’s vRealize Log Insight product, which enables real-time monitoring of application logs, network traces, configuration files, messages and performance data, has also added support for Kubernetes. It’s also getting deeper integration with VMware Cloud on AWS, which is a service that extends on-premises VMware vSphere environments to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud infrastructure.

Finally, VMware said it’s adding a more simplified onboarding experience for VMware Skyline users. VMware Skyline is a proactive support service for customers that automatically and securely collects, aggregates and analyzes product usage in order to identify potential problems.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that enterprises are running increasingly complex environments to host their next-generation applications. He said that a growing number of those apps these days are containerized, so it’s becoming more important for vendors to provide platforms that enable them to be deployed and monitored more effectively.

“VMware is throwing its vRealize suite in the ring, and today’s updates bring some positive new capabilities, most interestingly around self-driving capabilities,” Mueller said. “This matters to executives because they need more ways to enable enterprise acceleration during uncertain, pandemic times.”

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE