Lifecycle Management

While vRealize Automation 8.0 may be the hot new cloud management platform from VMware, vRealize Automation 7.6 still enjoys widespread usage due to its long life and rich feature set. As such, VMware continues to provide bug fixes for vRealize Automation 7.6. Continuing this trend, VMware recently released Hotfix 3 for vRealize Automation 7.6 on February 25, 2020. This cumulative update brings us fixes for 14 separate issues relating to performance, UI, vRealize Operations integration, and adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

When it comes to vRealize Automation 8.0, VMware has been moving full steam ahead with rapid product updates containing new features, capabilities, and bug fixes. Continuing this trend, on January 17, 2020, VMware released the first hotfix for vRealize Automation 8.0.1. Included in it are three enhancements, ten improvements, and fifteen fixes for items relating to the IaaS API, Provisioning, Action-based extensibility (ABX), vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), and Virtual appliance/clustering. The hotfix can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.

VMware has released a new maintenance update to vRealize Operations 8.0 that includes performance and stability improvements. The list of resolved issues in vRealize Operations 8.0.1 includes: The rsyslog service does not run with vRealize Operations Manager parameters. After Service Discovery is configured, the Execute Script and Get Top Processes actions do not work from the Inventory > Objects page. The Set Memory of VM action does not work and the memory hot plug is not supported on virtual machines.

VMware has released a new update to vRealize Automation 8.0, bringing with it new features, as well as improvements and bug fixes. Unfortunately, vRealize Automation 8.0.1 still does not provide an upgrade/migration path from 7.x to 8.0. We likely will not see upgrade/migration functionality until version 8.1. New features in this release include: Migration from vRealize Automation 7.5 or 7.6 assessment vRealize Automation Migration Assessment Offline Capture Utility 1.0.0 allows you to collect data from your vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, or external vRealize Orchestrator source environment offline.

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.