Automation

While vRealize Automation 8.0 may be the hot new cloud management platform from VMware, vRealize Automation 7.6 still enjoys widespread usage due to its long life and rich feature set. As such, VMware continues to provide bug fixes for vRealize Automation 7.6. Continuing this trend, VMware recently released Hotfix 3 for vRealize Automation 7.6 on February 25, 2020. This cumulative update brings us fixes for 14 separate issues relating to performance, UI, vRealize Operations integration, and adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

If you’re like most large IT environments, a device naming standard is common to maintain order on your network when deploying new devices. Some IT environments utilize simple naming standards, while others are complex and might vary depending on location, device type, device usage, or some other abstract reason. vRealize Automation 8 introduced significant improvements over vRealize Automation 7 when it comes to machine naming including support for naming templates based on:

When it comes to vRealize Automation 8.0, VMware has been moving full steam ahead with rapid product updates containing new features, capabilities, and bug fixes. Continuing this trend, on January 17, 2020, VMware released the first hotfix for vRealize Automation 8.0.1. Included in it are three enhancements, ten improvements, and fifteen fixes for items relating to the IaaS API, Provisioning, Action-based extensibility (ABX), vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), and Virtual appliance/clustering. The hotfix can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.

VMware has released a new update to vRealize Automation 8.0, bringing with it new features, as well as improvements and bug fixes. Unfortunately, vRealize Automation 8.0.1 still does not provide an upgrade/migration path from 7.x to 8.0. We likely will not see upgrade/migration functionality until version 8.1. New features in this release include: Migration from vRealize Automation 7.5 or 7.6 assessment vRealize Automation Migration Assessment Offline Capture Utility 1.0.0 allows you to collect data from your vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, or external vRealize Orchestrator source environment offline.

vRealize Automation 8.0 brought with it a completely new method for controlling access to resources within our cloud environments. In previous versions of vRealize Automation, the concept of a Reservation existed, which provided a clear contract as to what compute, storage, and network resources a particular Business Group had access to as well as limits on the amount of memory and storage resources that the Business Group could consume. Fast forward to vRealize Automation 8.