Almost exactly 3 years after vSphere 6.7 was released (April 17, 2018) and approximately 17 months prior to the end of General Support (October 15, 2022), the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) made available the first STIGs for VMware vSphere 6.7 on April 22, 2021. The STIGs can be downloaded from the Public DoD Cyber Exchange STIGs Document Library by searching for “VMware vSphere 6.7”. What’s New? Unlike the previous VMware vSphere 6.

VMware vRealize Operations 8.4 has reached general availability as of April 15, 2021. With this release, VMware has provided several enhancements and new capabilities, including: vRealize Application Remote Collector has been deprecated and replaced by Cloud Proxy Introduction of the new vRealize Operations Automation Center that allows for scheduling of automation jobs from within vRealize Operations Introduction of Alert Payload Templates that allow for easy customization of alert plugin content Simplified Alert Notifications Outbound Plugin Enhancements Telegraf-based Application Monitoring Enhancements Major enhancements regarding cost management and reporting Support for VMware Cloud on AWS Costing APIs for Pricing Rate Cards Cost Optimization Dashboards New Cost and Price Dashboards for both the consumer layer and provider layer What If – Migration Planning for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) and Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Tag-Based Price as Individual Metrics Costing and Pricing of Short-Lived VMs allowing for tracking VMs to a minimum granularity of five minutes lifetime Energy Consumed, OS Categories, and Number of Rack Units as new cost drivers Ability to export all content using a single button for backup/restore, cloud migration, and disaster recovery use cases Availability of a system access URL (vRealize Operations Cluster LB IP/FQDN) to support registration of vRealize Operations within Center using the load balancer URL (FINALLY!

VMware vRealize Automation 8.4 has reached general availability as of April 15, 2021. With this release, VMware has provided several enhancements and new capabilities, including: Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 compliance for SaltStack Config Accessibility enhancements Consolidated secret store Addition of resource tag-based as well as string-based and integer-based operators for use in policy criteria Changes and improvements to the onboarding process including a simplification of the process, the ability to change the project for an onboarded deployment as a day 2 action, the ability to unregister an onboarded deployment, and the ability to bring in the connected vSphere network interface as part of onboarding Numerous changes regarding VM disks, disk placement, and disk management Cloud Assembly Support for Multiple Disks Clusters, Disk Sizes per Template & SCSI Controller Management Cloud Assembly’s Disk Placement, Storage allocation enhancements and Optimized Cluster Disk Deployment/Attachment Better vRA support for disks which are part of an image template Additional image and snapshot management capabilities for Azure Enhancements to Ansible and Puppet support A major redesign to the ServiceNow ITSM plugin A brand new vRealize Automation plugin for vRealize Orchestrator Updated access token API behavior A new “force delete” functionality for IaaS API endpoints Support for Azure VMware Solution and Google Cloud VMware Engine Changes to the “blueprint-service,” “Snapshot Creation for Block Device - Provisioning Service,” “Azure Storage profile creation - Provisioning Service,” “Attach Block Device to a Machine - Provisioning Service” API endpoints, as well as the addition of a new “Resource quota policy - Aggregator service” API endpoint For the full details on all changes in vRealize Automation 8.

On November 13, 2020, VMware released the first patch for vRealize Automation 8.2. Patch 1 including twenty-five fixes for the Provisioning Engine, the Service Broker, Migration and Assessment Services, vRealize Orchestrator, and virtual appliance/clustering. The patch can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.2. It is recommended to install vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.2 Patch 1 before installing vRealize Automation 8.2 Patch 1 (8.2.0.13070). For complete details on the items that have been resolved with this hotfix, review the VMware KB article Cumulative Update for vRealize Automation 8.

The annual VMworld conference always includes large product announcements, and in line with this history, VMware today has announced their intent to acquire SaltStack. Salt is a python-based open-source platform for event-driven IT automation, remote task execution, and configuration management platform that utilizes infrastructure as code. Salt originated from the need for high-speed data collection and task execution for systems administrators managing massive infrastructure scale and resulting complexity. SaltStack is the company that now maintains the Salt Open project and develops and sells SaltStack Enterprise software, services, and support.