VMware vRealize Automation 7.3

vRealize Automation 7.3, the next iteration of VMware’s industry-leading cloud automation platform. While this is a an incremental “dot” release on the outside, it packs a punch in feature/functionality on the inside.

This release continues the trend of delivering awesome innovations, improved user experience and greater / deeper integration into the ecosystem its managing. Below is a summary of many of the new features and capabilities that are packed into vRA 7.3.

Enhanced API’s for Deploying, Upgrading and Migrating vRA - A new set of APIs to programmatically install, upgrade, and migrate the platform itself.

REST API Improvements – Customers can now deploy, configure, manage and consume vRealize Automation using a variety of programatic interfaces thanks to vRA’s ever-evolving REST API. VMware has released several new resources to help promote the use of these APIs, including the vRealize Automation Programing Guide, an updated Postman collection that includes several of the most commonly used API’s, and many additions to VMware{code}.

Audit Logging Framework – Tracking and analyzing user activity and security events is a critical enterprise requirement. vRA’s new Audit Logging Framework provides system-wide logging and auditing capabilities to gain additional visibility into your vRA environment. The VAMI-accessible Audit Log Integration option adds seamless integration with vRealize Log Insight and other syslog solutions, enables logging of essential services across IaaS and .net (windows) services, can be used to audit workflow subscriptions, IaaS services and more. The new service can be enabled in the VAMI or via API.

Integrated Health Service – The Health Service (vRPT) has now been integrated into vRealize Automation admin interface.

Parameterized Blueprints – This new feature leverages Size and Image policies to create consistent sizing policies (e.g. Small, Medium, Large, etc) intended to reduce blueprint sprawl.

Intelligent Workload Placement (WLP) – vRealize Automation can now use data in vRealize Operations (version 6.6) to provide analytics-based capacity management on vSphere. This includes the initial placement of a new instance, optimised according to performance goals, a ‘Balance’ policy used to maintain maximum headroom in case of spikes and a ‘Consolidate’ policy to leave space for large workloads.

Container Management – vRealize Automation now natively supports VMware Integrated Containers (VIC), allowing admins to add/manage VCH instances in vRA with a feature set similar traditional Docker hosts. vRA 7.3 also adds support for Docker volumes, allowing authors to create / attach volumes to containers and deploy volumes with container apps.

Config Automation Framework – vRA 7.3 adds native integration with Puppet, allowing actions such registering Puppet Master as an endpoint, drag-and-dropping Puppet nodes, dynamically querying Puppet Master, environment, and roles.

Azure Public Cloud Service Design Enhancements – A number of enhancements to the new Azure Endpoint like the ability to select, drag-and-drop software components on Azure machines in the blueprint designer, specify software properties on the blueprint designer and on the request form plus a set of pre-populated forms and dropdowns.

The control of NSX Endpoints is now extended to:

NSX on-demand NAT

• Port forwarding rules can be configured at design time
• Rules can be ordered
• Rules can be added, removed, and reordered after you create them

NSX Security Group and Tag Management

• Able to add existing NSX security groups or tags to a running application
• Able to disassociate NSX security groups and tags from applications

High Availability Automated for NSX Edge Services

• Edge high-availability mode in the blueprint provides high availability for all edge services to an application when it is deployed
• Configurable per blueprint based on application availability needs
• Use custom properties to determine high availability at request time
• Adds high availability for load balancing, NAT, firewall, and so on

NSX Edge Size Selection

• Able to specify deployment size for NSX Edge Services Gateway (ESG)
• Configurable per-blueprint based on application needs or scale
• Uses custom properties for size selection at request time