Last week we had a briefing in the vExpert Cloud Management program on the announcements for VMWorld 2020 this week. It is one of the great perks of the program. Product managers and technical marketing take time to present to the team, which is greatly appreciated!

The announcements in a nutshell are:
– VMware vRealize Cloud Universal. A new Generation of SaaS.
– VMware vRealize AI Cloud. Machine learning comes to your metrics.
– Skyline 2.0
– vRealize Operations Cloud/ 8.2
– vRealize Automation Cloud/ 8.2
– vRealize Log Insight Cloud/ 8.2

Now let me start by sharing an insight I got during the presentation and that I verified with an insider:

It is cloud first from now on.

Yes you read that right. What do I mean by that ? Well until now VMware had a SaaS version of every cloud management product and the versions were more or less up to par. With the introduction of Cloud Universal only cloud subscribers will get their hands on AI Cloud. And only the SaaS version will allow you to reduce the infamous 5-minute monitoring interval in vRealize Operations from 5 minutes to 20s for realtime monitoring. And there are other differences.

This means you will want to rethink your cloud management strategy. Fortunately Cloud Universal is a new hybrid subscription that allows a combination of on-prem and SaaS with one license.

AI Cloud is a new offering included in Cloud Universal. It applies Reinforcement Learning to vSAN in this first instalment, continuously analysing and learning and dynamically applying actions to vSAN to optimise performance. We get a glance here of where operations management is going thanks to machine learning techniques.

Apart from updates in cost management, my beloved vROps 8.2 gets a boost in the APM front! It is now possible to integrate the app discovery from Network Insight into vROps! There is also an APM tool to integrate application data from App Dynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace and New Relic into vROps! This means a big step forward in extending full stack monitoring to applications, so that vROps becomes more and more the full stack monitoring platform, across clouds and apps in the enterprise. BUT… Note that the APM integrations are vRealize Operations Cloud only at the moment….

All in all exciting updates coming in cloud management, stay tuned for more details at VMworld 2020 this week. If you would like to discuss you can find me this week on the Orbital Jigsaw Discord server. There are chats and voice meeting rooms to discuss! If you want more info on this great community effort during VMWorld, read the blog post.