VMware round of Q2 releases including vRA 7.1, vROPs 6.3, vRCS 2.1, Cloud Client 4.2, vRB 7.1 and more

Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

Many of you may have already seen the news, but I like to create a roll up to make it easy to see what’s been newly released.  Yesterday Tuesday August 23rd 2016 VMware released a number of much awaited Management product updates.  See below for a breakdown of the updates per product.

vRealize Automation 7.1

What’s new?

vRealize Automation 7.1 is optimized for growing clouds thanks to significant improvements in the automated installation experience.

vRealize Automation 7.1 continue simplifying the primarily and secondary setup process by adding ability to automate the setup process among similar deployments leveraging the new Silent Installer. Cloud Admins are now able to scale out existing vRealize deployment by adding more vRA components and manage them automatically though the new Command Line(CLI) interface.

vRA 7.1 release is also equipped with a brand new Migration tool which allows you to perform safe and sound side by side upgrade (migration) existing vRealize Automation systems 6.2.X to the latest and greatest release. During the migration process the source production environment remains intact which guarantees a minimum downtime of the production environment.

Download Details:

vRealize Orchestrator 7.1

What’s new?

vRealize Orchestrator 7.1 introduces a number of improvements, bug fixes, and extends the automated configuration with new options:

· Option to push configuration from one node to all other nodes in the cluster and ability to restart all nodes from a single node.

· Monitoring of configuration differences between the nodes in a cluster by using the fingerprints for currently running or pending configuration that are available in Control Center.

vRealize Orchestrator 7.1 also introduces a number of plug-in improvements:

· Swagger definition support for adding a REST host in the HTTP-REST plug-in.

· Improved Search capabilities in the Active Directory plug-in.

· Pagination support and arbitrary entry querying in the Active Directory plug-in.

· Added a REST API to update resource elements.

With the certificate management mechanism based on ISsslService, implemented in version 7.1, the server and trusted certificates are stored in the database. Plug-ins must use API from the Plug-in SDK to retrieve the trusted certificates.

Download Details:

vRealize CloudClient 4.2

What’s new?

· Numerous improvements to login and authentication, including enhancements to the certificate checking capability introduced in CloudClient 4.1

· Option to disable auto-completion when CloudClient is used for scripting

· New commands are available to manage catalog icons and update catalog services

· Disaster recovery scenarios with Site Recovery Manager for machines provisioned through XaaS are now supported through CloudClient

For additional details about this release, please refer to the Release Notes (links below).

Download Details:

vRealize Code Stream 2.1

What’s New

vRealize Code Stream 2.1 offers several new out-of the-box integrations with PaaS (Cloud Foundry), Issue tracking (Atlassian JIRA, Bugzilla), Build & CI (Atlassian Bamboo) and Collaboration (VMware Socialcast) systems in the context of release automation.  A brand new Dashboard provides Dev, QE, Release and Operations teams with configurable views to track the specific build and release information they are interested in. Furthermore, the pipeline modeling experience has been significantly enhanced with new capabilities such as nested pipelines, an overall faster and more intuitive user interface, and simpler invocation of scripts and vRealize Orchestrator workflows.

New out-of-the box Integrations

• Cloud FoundryCloud Foundry is an open source cloud platform as a service (PaaS) that enables deploying and running applications at scale. The Cloud Foundry integration works with its commercial implementations including Pivotal Cloud Foundry. vRealize Code Stream 2.1 supports Cloud Foundry version 255 ( Pivotal Cloud Foundry version 1.6) and later. The integration provides the following capabilities:
  • Manage Cloud Foundry server endpoints.
  • Deploy application using either manifest or ad-hoc configuration.
  • Start or stop a deployed application.
  • Delete a deployed application.
  • Bind or unbind services to an application.
  • Scale up or down a deployed application.
• Bamboo
  Atlassian Bamboo is a continuous integration and deployment tool. The Bamboo integration works across commercial and free versions of the Bamboo server. vRealize Code Stream 2.1 supports Bamboo server version 5.9 and later. The integration provides the following capabilities:
  • Manage Bamboo server endpoints.
  • Trigger build plans on Bamboo server.
• JIRA
  Atlassian JIRA is an issue tracking tool. vRealize Code Stream 2.1 supports JIRA server version 6.3 and later. The JIRA integration provides the following  capabilities:
  • Manage JIRA server endpoints.
  • Create an issue for any issue type including the user-defined types.
  • Update an issue with comments, mark as done, and reassign.
• Bugzilla
  Bugzilla is an open-source defect tracking system. vRealize Code Stream 2.1 supports Bugzilla version 5.0.1 and later. The Bugzilla integration supports the following capabilities:
  • Create a defect with user-defined values for mandatory and optional parameters.
  • Update a defect with comments and defect state, and reassign.
• Socialcast
  Socialcast is a VMware enterprise collaboration platform. The Socialcast integration provides the capability of posting pipeline execution updates such as execution start, and failures to a user configured socialcast group.

Brand New Dashboard

vRealize Code Stream 2.1 introduces a brand new dashboard that gives a bird’s eye view of specific pipeline executions and is customized on a user basis and shareable with other users within the same tenant.
The dashboard provides the following capabilities:

• Create custom dashboards for specific pipeline executions along with pertinent pipeline parameters.
• Monitor status of all task executions across the stages and concurrent executions of a pipeline in a compact format.
• Monitor status of specific task execution within the pipeline execution.
• Add columns representing important pipeline parameters such as Build-id, Commit-Id, and Triggered-by to the dashboard.
• Publish dashboards to other users in the tenant.

Other Enhancements

The other modeling enhancements are:

• Nested Pipelines: Model pipeline templates to trigger other pipelines during execution. Nested pipelines enable modeling more complex and re-useable pipeline logic such as roll-backs, and deployment setup.
• Inline Scripts: In addition to executing scripts on remote hosts, inline scripts (bash/PowerShell) can be specified as part of script task configuration. Inline scripts can use and dynamically consume pipeline parameters at runtime.
• Endpoint Management: Endpoint configuration for various integrations to external systems is now available within the Code Stream tab.
• External vRealize Orchestrator: In addition to the embedded instance of vRealize Orchestrator, pipeline templates can include tasks that invoke workflows on remote instances of vRealize Orchestrator.

 vRealize Operations 6.3.0

What’s New?

vRealize Operations Manager 6.3 is a release update that enhances product stability, performance, and usability.

Enhanced Workload Placement and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) Integration:

• Recommended Actions on landing page
• Configure DRS from vRealize Operations Manager with Cluster/DRS Dashboard
• Data Collection Notification toolbar
• Perform Actions from Workload Utilization Dashboard

Improved Log Insight Integration:

• Management Pack for Log Insight included in product
• Improved Log Insight and vRealize Operations Manager alerting

Enhanced vSphere Monitoring:

• Support vSphere 6.0 Hardening Guide
• vRealize Operations Manager Compliance for vSphere 6.0 Objects
• vRealize Operations Manager and vCenter Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) Health Dashboards

General improvements:

• New API Programming Guide
• New licensing plan for vRealize Operations Manager Standard and Advanced Editions
• Filtered SNMP Trap Alert Notifications
• Enhanced SuperMetric capabilities
• Reduction in default metrics collected

vREalize Business for Cloud 7.1

What’s New

• Supports multiple versions of vRealize Automation. vRealize Business for Cloud 7.1 is compatible with the vRealize Automation 6.2.3, 6.2.4, 6.2.5, 7.0, 7.0.1, and 7.1 releases.
• Allows integration with external VMware Identity Manager. You can use standalone vRealize Business for Cloud 7.1, without deploying vRealize Automation.
• Includes UI changes. The Overview page is updated with new widgets to provide more information about cost and consumption.
• Provides a new version of reference database. A new version of the reference database is available with vRealize Business for Cloud 7.1.
• Segregates the Azure EA account cost. vRealize Business for Cloud 7.1 groups the overall cost of the Azure account based on the individual billing account.
• Supports Spanish locale. vRealize Business for Cloud 7.1 supports Spanish locale UI also. The following languages are supported:
  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Spanish
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Traditional Chinese

vRealize Production Test 1.6.0

What’s new?

· Self-service UI for running upgrade assessments

· All upgrade checks can be run from a single GUI

· Windows executable for simplified use on vRealize Automation IaaS components

vRealize Hyperic 5.8.6

What’s new?

In addition to fixing issues, the following changes have been made in vRealize Hyperic 5.8.6.

• The Java Runtime Environment has been updated to version 1.7 101.

• Apache Struts has been updated to version 2.3.29.

• Apache Tomcat has been updated to version 8.0.33a.

• TLS has been updated to version 1.2.

• vPostgres SQL has been upgraded to version 9.3.12.

• The following updates have been made to plug-ins:

• The Websphere MQ plug-in is updated to support version 8.
• The Jboss plug-in is updated to support Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.3.0.GA.
• The Oracle driver has been upgraded to version 11.2.0.4.

Download Pages:                    

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vrealize_hyperic/5_8

Release Notes:

http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/hyperic/586/releasenotes_hyperic586.html