Today, VMware is announcing vRealize Operations 8.6 which includes a ton of additional features and capabilities. These updates include numerous enhancements to public cloud support (including support for monitoring ALL AWS services including custom metrics), a revamped user interface, support for defining custom email notices within the user interface (FINALLY!), new methods to define customer groups, the inclusion of vRealize True Visibility compute and storage management packs for all editions, and new sustainability-related dashboards.

Today is the first day of VMworld 2021 and with it, VMware has announced VMware vRealize Automation 8.6. With it comes many additional enhancements and a few new features to make managing your clouds much simpler. As is typical, VMware has not provided an exact release date but has stated that it will be released in Q3 of FY22. Enhancements in vRealize Automation 8.6 Leverage Azure provisioning capabilities, including the ability to configure the name for the Azure NIC interfaces.

With the upcoming release of vRealize True Visibility Suite, VMware will be entitling all vRealize Operations customers with access to the compute and storage management packs available within the suite. Previously, access to all of these management packs would require a license to the Advanced (Standard+) edition of vRealize True Visibility Suite. Going forward, no additional license key will be required to install and use these management packs. After this upcoming release becomes generally available, you will be able to access the management packs by visiting the Customer Connect portal and looking for the vRealize Operations Management Packs for Compute and Storage.

VMware vRealize Automation 8.5 has reached general availability as of August 19, 2021. With this release, VMware has provided several enhancements and new capabilities, including: Assign a Project Administrator as an approver in Approval Policies. Customize the amount of time an IP address is retained before being released after it is no longer in use. Limit the number of K8 Supervisor Namespaces that can deployed for a given Project. The vRealize Orchestrator plug-in for vRealize Automation 8.

On June 24, 2021, VMware released the second minor update to vRealize Automation 8.4. vRealize Automation 8.4.2 adds several updates and includes a few bug fixes as well. The full release notes can be found here: vRealize Automation 8.4.2 Release Notes. Known Issue During Upgrades There is a known issue with upgrading to this release. In the previous vRealize Automation 8.4.1 release, VMware made a change to the user permissions within vRealize Automation regarding the Migration Assistant service.