vRealize Operations 6.0 Announced

Today at VMworld Europe, VMware have officially unveiled vRealize Operations 6.0.

This rebranding of the vCenter Operations Management Suite not only re-positions the product but it also introduces some much needed enhancements and features. Key amongst those are:

New Deployment Model

vCOps instances were not very scalable in the past. Once you reached a certain level, you'd be forced to deploy another one i.e. another “Analytics VM” and another “UI VM”. Scaling was achieved purely through the manipulation of hardware resources for the VMs.

With vRealize Ops 6.0, the analytics and UI components are combined in a single appliance (or apparently a Linux / Windows installer) that can easily be scaled by introduced another instance to the cluster. The product now includes built-in clustering capabilities, enabling very easy scaling between a small deployment and a much larger one as well as introducing resiliency to the product.

Customisable Alert Definitions

It will be possible with vROps 6.0 to combine multiple symptoms together to define alerts. Also, scripts or vCO workflows can be assigned to these alerts to enable automated, self-healing actions.

Dashboards and Reports

Both of these are now customisable enabling the creation of views that are tailored to an organisation's needs.

New Management Packs

There are a number of new management packs coming for OpenStack, NSX, Amazon AWS and vCloud Air amongst others and the method for installing and configuring them has been streamlined.

Upgrades and Availability

Side-by-side migration from vCenter Operations 5.8 to vRealize Operations 6.0 will be possible. vROps is due to be generally available in Q4 2014.