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Cross? Us? Nah, we're just going hard on hybrids, says VMware

vRealize refresh sees Virtzilla play nice with Puppet, AWS and Azure

VMware's forthcoming “Cross-Cloud Architecture” will be its big effort to manage workloads and resources across any on-premises or cloudy stack. But it's not due to debut for a month or three and when it lands will embrace Virtzilla vRealize range of management and orchestration products. And as it happens that range has just received its bi-annual refresh, revealing a few hybrid-cloud-wrangling features that hint at how Cross-cloud will evolve.

Among the new bits are the vRealize Automation 7.3 upgrade that can now build infrastructure to order as defined in Puppet. The 7.3 update also adds the ability to provision into Microsoft's Azure cloud and has incorporated the Admiral container management portal. VMware plans to add integration with other configuration management tools in the near future, because it sees “DevOps Ready IT” as something it needs to get right before developers start to complain that virtualized infrastructure is not as easy to provision as public clouds.

vRealize Operations 6.6 has been imbued with better automated workload placement and a “predicted Distributed Resource Scheduler” that can figure out when workloads are going to hit trouble and move them to safer places. The software's also gown links to vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 that make a database of cloud pricing available as a tab in the management console. VMware will also tap into your last AWS or Azure bill, look up cloud pricing, compare to its own calculations for the cost of running workloads and offer recommendations about what it will cost to run the workloads you're likely to require. Another addition is native VSAN management, even for VSAN clusters stretched across multiple sites*

vRealize Network Insight 3.4 can now grok AWS Virtual Private Cloud tags, so that security policies set in Amazon's cloud can be incorporated into wider networking and automation plans.

A solid set of upgrades, then, that address some of VMware's cross-portfolio integration priorities to make all its stuff work better together, while also addressing of the realities it faces as it attempts to extend its franchise into the worlds of cloud and DevOps.

But the company's definitive statement on this stuff looks like coming in late August, given VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger's remarks in last week's earnings call that “some cross-cloud services” will soon be revealed. ®

* Neatly eroding one of the things NetApp thinks it alone brings to hyperconverged systems, as we predicted.

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