VMware, has unveiled an updated to their cloud management portfolio, including significant enhancements to the management products in the recently released VMware vCloud Suite.  VMware is also introducing a new product to the suite, VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1, and is updating the VMware IT Business Management Suite to further simplify and automate management while empowering IT to govern services across multiple, heterogeneous clouds.

“Businesses of all sizes are leveraging a decade of virtualization investments to transform IT through the software-defined datacenter,” said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president, cloud infrastructure and management, VMware. “VMware’s cloud management offerings fundamentally recast management for the cloud era, allowing customers to operate at cloud scale and begin to act as brokers of IT services to the business.” 

VMware Cloud Management™solutions help deliver the software-defined datacenter, allowing customers to achieve the efficiency and agility of cloud computing. VMware’s approach to managing hybrid and heterogeneous clouds addresses three critical areas:

• Cloud Service Provisioning: Automate the provisioning and governance of infrastructure, applications and desktops as a service according to business and IT policies.
• Cloud Operations Management:Leverage analytics and intelligence to help ensure the performance, compliance and efficiency of cloud infrastructure.
• Cloud Business Management: Govern and manage cloud services as a critical element of running IT like a business.

“The flexibility and scalability enabled by our VMware-powered private cloud helps us address business needs by accelerating the delivery of business critical applications and services,” said Fred Pond, vice president and CIO, Columbia Sportswear. “Our investment in VMware cloud management helps us simplify and automate the management of our cloud. This powerful combination means that Columbia Sportswear is able to respond to business and market opportunities faster than ever before.”

VMware vCloud Suite Gets Enhanced Service Provisioning and Operations Management 
Introduced in August 2012, the VMware vCloud Suite brings together the components customers need to build, operate and manage cloud infrastructure. Today VMware is introducing significant advancements to the management components of the VMware vCloud Suite:

• vCloud Automation Center™ 5.1 – Multi-cloud infrastructure and desktop provisioning 
  To help customers better govern the provisioning of IT services, VMware is introducing VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1, a new addition to the VMware vCloud Suite.  Based on DynamicOps, which VMware acquired in July 2012, VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1 acts as a service governor, enabling policy-based provisioning across VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructure, multiple hypervisors and Amazon Web Services. 

Through a self-service portal – essentially a cross-cloud storefront – vCloud Automation Center will allow authorized administrators, developers or business users to request new IT services or manage existing resources.  VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1 will now be integrated with VMware vCloud Director to allow customers to leverage virtual datacenters comprised of VMware vCloud Suite’s software-defined services.  vCloud Automation Center 5.1 will also integrate with vCenter Orchestrator to automate IT process workflows across both VMware and customers’ existing management tools and processes. 
Learn more about vCloud Automation Center 5.1

• vFabric™ Application Director™ 5.0 – Provision applications on any cloud 
  vFabric Application Director standardizes and accelerates how customers model and deploy multi-tier applications to any cloud through easy-to-create blueprints with standardized, pre-approved OS and middleware components. While optimized for VMware vCloud Suite-based clouds, vFabric Application Director 5.0 will make it possible for customers to use the same blueprints to deploy applications across multiple virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructures, including Amazon EC2.

With this release, VMware will continue to expand vFabric Application Director application support to include all Microsoft packaged applications (Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint) as well as custom applications (Java,.Net, Ruby on Rails). VMware vFabric Application Director will also help simplify ongoing application maintenance tasks such as code and configuration, and it will support auto-scaling of applications in response to changing business needs. 
Learn more about what’s new in vFabric Application Director 5.0

• vCenter Operations Management Suite™ 5.6 – Embedded, integrated cloud operations management 
  The vCenter Operations Management Suite applies patented analytics to integrated performance, capacity and configuration management, providing the intelligence customers need to proactively enable service levels in hybrid cloud environments. The VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite can double the operational savings customers receive from VMware vSphere®.  With this release, VMware will include the performance management capabilities of the VMware vCenter Operations Suite in all versions of VMware vSphere.

Enhancements to the VMware vCenter Operations Suite 5.6 continue to deliver on VMware’s strategy to converge management disciplines, incorporating new compliance views into the operations dashboard to help customers proactively enforce compliance with IT policies, security guidelines and regulatory requirements. New, customizable, group-based views will enable IT operations to more closely align with business priorities. VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 will also include VMware vFabric Hyperic application-level monitoring to help customers proactively manage the health of business-critical applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Windows OS as well as Oracle Database and custom Java applications.  
Learn more about what’s new in the vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6

• vCloud Connector 2.0 – Hybrid cloud portability 
  VMware is introducing significant enhancements to VMware vCloud Connector, a bridge that enables customers to transfer VMs and applications across vSphere and vCloud Director private cloud environments as well as public clouds from VMware vCloud Service Providers. vCloud Connector 2.0 will help make it possible to extend both networks and workload catalogs across hybrid cloud environments – in effect, extending the logical boundaries of the datacenter – without the need for reconfiguring networks or settings when moving workloads. Also, distributed teams will be able to coordinate their development efforts by ensuring that everyone has a single, synchronized workload catalog that spans across the cloud environment. Learn more about what’s new in vCloud Connector 2.0

According to Gartner, “Cloud computing is accentuating the role of IT as a service broker.  Success in implementing a cloud computing strategy requires IT infrastructure and operations to become proactive in creating pre-defined policies, service levels and actions that take place automatically in the runtime environment.”

VMware IT Business Management Suite 7.5 Enables Cloud Business Management 
As the strategic importance of cloud computing grows, IT needs solutions to manage the business of cloud effectively by measuring the performance and cost across all cloud services – infrastructure, application and end-user computing.  The VMware IT Business Management Suite gives customers transparency into the cost, quality and value of cloud services, providing a business context for IT activities and enabling fact-based decisions aligned with business goals and ultimately transform to become a broker of IT services.

Today, VMware is introducing VMware IT Business Management Suite 7.5 with a new IT benchmarking module that includes more than 3,500 metrics across 18 domains, allowing IT organizations to compare their performance with industry and functional peers.  VMware IT Business Management Suite 7.5 also includes enhancements to its IT Finance Manager capabilities that will further automate and streamline the budgeting process.