vCAC 6.0 Announced

vCAC 6.0 was announced in Tuesday's General Session and it's expected to be generally available in mid-November 2013. For me, this is the most exciting announcement to come out of VMworld Europe. It's all about building, deploying and managing application catalogs.

VMware acquired DynamicOps in mid-2012 and managed to rebrand and launch it as vCloud Automation Center 5.1 at VMworld last year. There has since been a 5.2 release but 6.0 includes some very significant changes. Two of the biggest are:

Appliances!

vCAC installation has historically been a bit of a pig. 5.2 has its own pre-requisite checker and a number of hoops to jump through to get it up and running. Jonathan Medd even recently produced a superb PowerShell script to automate the setup of the pre-requisites.

With 6.0 however, vCAC is being partially released as a virtual appliance by being broken down into several components. The IaaS (.NET) core is still hosted on Windows but the Self-Service portal and Application Director (see below) components are virtual appliances. The portal appliance includes a full instance of vCO.

On the face of it, deploying vCAC may seem more involved but having some key functionality hosted in virtual appliances is a sensible move in my opinion.

Say Hello to Application Director

There is now going to be greater integration with (vFabric) Application Director and the latter will actually be bundled with vCAC 6.0 although it will be distributed as a separate appliance. The point of this is to allow organisations to define and build applications (blueprints) in Application Director and then manage deployment and infrastructure through vCAC.

There's a lab available in the Hands-on-Labs that showcases the vCAC 6.0 beta. Try it out.