VMware Introduces New vRealize Cloud Universal

September 29, 2020

Reading time: 4 minutes

Today, VMware is introducing the new vRealize Cloud Universal subscription. With this new hybrid subscription offering, VMware is providing customers the flexibility to consume both on-premise and SaaS vRealize Suite products and services using a single subscription license. This offering allows customers the freedom to move workloads between on-premise and SaaS offerings interchangeably without the requirement to purchase new licenses. Additionally, this new offering provides access to Cloud Federated Analytics and Cloud Federated Catalog capabilities.

What’s Included in vRealize Cloud Universal

As I mentioned, vRealize Cloud Universal provides customers with access to both the on-premise and SaaS-based offerings for the vRealize Suite of products. The following chart lists the products included in this new offering:

While most of the products in this chart are familiar, a few new items in the chart such as vRealize AI Cloud, vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager, vRealize Cloud Federated Analytics, and vRealize Cloud Federated Catalog are new. Below, I’ll provide a quick introduction to each of these new products.

vRealize AI Cloud

https://youtu.be/FL_BSwsuGi0

If we take a step back to August of 2019, VMware introduced a new project titled “Project Magna” that would utilize AI modeling to automatically tune vSAN environments to improve performance as part of the Self Driving Data Center vision. vRealize AI Cloud is the official product name for the Project Magna solution. vRealize AI Cloud utilizes reinforcement learning to continually optimize your vSAN environments.

While this release is currently limited to vSAN tuning, and storage policy-based management recommendations (currently in tech preview), future updates will include security, performance, cost, capacity, and availability optimations for both vSphere and NSX-T.

To learn more, please visit the vRealize AI Cloud product page on VMware at https://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-ai-cloud.html

vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager

The vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager is a cloud utility service that integrates with vRealize Lifecycle Manager to collect data for your on-premises products and integrates with respective cloud services to monitor license data usage for your cloud services.

vRealize Cloud Federated Analytics

This new solution enables IT organizations to analyze hybrid and multi-cloud environments via a single web interface. It provides a unified analytical view of workloads, underlying health, and capacity across your global IT environment. It will only be available as a SaaS offering.

vRealize Cloud Federated Catalog

The new vRealize Cloud Federated Catalog enables IT organizations to deliver a unified catalog of IT infrastructure resources to end-users globally. It will provide you the ability to access both your on-premise vRA and Cloud vRA catalogs while providing consistent governance globally. This product will only be available as a SaaS offering.

VMware Skyline Proactive Intelligence

While VMware Skyline isn’t exactly new, this new update will feed Skyline findings directly into vRealize Operations Cloud allowing for a unified experience, issue avoidance, and automate remediations. The new Skyline Operational Overview feature within Skyline Advisor will provide you with quick access to clusters, host and VM configurations as well as the ability to contextually launch into vRealize Operations Cloud. To learn more about VMware Skyline, please visit the product page on VMware at https://cloud.vmware.com/skyline.

vCloud Suite Subscription

In addition to offering vRealize Cloud Universal, VMware is also offering a vCloud Suite Subscription that includes both vRealize Cloud Universal as well as VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus to host your on-premise workloads.

Packaging Editions

vRealize Cloud Universal and vCloud Suite subscriptions will be available in three editions: Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise.

To learn more about pricing and editions or to get started with vRealize Cloud Universal, you can visit the VMware Cloud at https://cloud.vmware.com/vrealize-cloud-universal.

Closing Thoughts

vRealize Cloud Universal appears to be a great offering that will provide customers with the flexibility to move from on-premise to the cloud at their own pace while maintaining access to the latest VMware vRealize Suite of products and cloud services. With the addition of the new vRealize Operations 8.2 and vRealize Automation 8.2, VMware has brought a lot of amazing new capabilities to the table to make IT easier.