vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0 is the latest release of VMware’s application platform for deploying, upgrading, and managing the various products included in the vRealize Suite. Don’t worry; you didn’t miss several releases between version 2.1 to version 8.0. Instead, VMware has decided to baseline all of the latest vRealize Suite products onto a common version number. Unlike with the previous version of Lifecycle Manager, upgrading to version 8.0 requires the deployment of a new virtual appliance and migration of your existing configuration.

The latest release of vRealize Automation 8.0 is based on a completely rewritten codebase and is a dramatic departure from the previous versions of vRealize Automation. vRealize Automation 8.0 is an on-premise release of the VMware vRealize Automation Cloud SaaS offering that has been available for a while now. The platform consists of 3 components: Cloud Assembly, Cloud Broker, and Code Stream. The new vRealize Automation 8.0 virtual appliance includes these components as well as an integrated version of vRealize Orchestrator 8.

For several years now, HPE has provided a simulated version of its 3PAR StoreServ storage array available for deployment in virtualized environments. While the simulator does not offer storage services to external devices, it is fully functional in almost all aspects allowing for complete testing of most features and management functions. In this post, we walk through the process to deploy and configure the simulator. Preparing for Deployment Before we can begin, we need to download the HPE 3PAR StoreServ Simulator from the My HPE Software Center.

I have been using vRealize Operations to monitor the compliance of virtual machines against the DISA VMware vSphere Virtual Machine STIG for quite some time now. With the release of the new VMware vSphere 6.5 Virtual Machine STIG, I have discovered that vRealize Operations does not collect all the necessary information out of the box to verify compliance with the new STIG rules. Rather than waiting for VMware to provide an update to vRealize Operations, I decided to utilize vRealize Orchestrator to add custom properties to the virtual machines in vRealize Operations using the vRealize Operations REST API.

As a follow-up to my previous post providing alert content for the VMware vSphere 6.5 Virtual Machine STIG Version 1, Release 1, I have also put together new alert content for the VMware vSphere 6.5 ESXi STIG Version 1, Release 1. See the link at the bottom of the page to download the alert content XML. The following STIG items cannot be verified by vRealize Operations because the checks are user process related, the configuration values are not currently collected by vRealize Operations, or the checks involve non-VMware assets (e.