The hybrid cloud is once again the center theme of VMware Inc.’s annual user conference in Barcelona, where attendees were greeted this morning by a new iteration of its infrastructure automation software that promises to take more complexity out of day-to-day operations. The main highlight is a new blueprinting capability for orchestrating complex environments.

The addition enables administrators to visualize the relationships and dependencies among their different workloads through a dedicated graphical dashboard built into vRealize Operations 7 that spans the entire stack, according to the company. That includes the machine on which a particular application runs, the network that serves its traffic and the surrounding security mechanisms.

The latter two elements are supported through newly added integration with VMware’s NSX software-defined networking stack, which also works the other way to simplify the implementation of application deployment models that would otherwise requiring manually reconfiguring switches and the other supporting equipment in order to set up.

That automation is particularly handy in hybrid environments where the complexity of an organization’s on-premise infrastructure is compounded by various off-premise resources. To support such use cases, VMware is complementing NSX integration with support for a number of cloud platforms including its own vCloud Air service, OpenStack and AWS.

Organizations can centrally manage billing across all of those clouds thanks to the centralized pricing management capabilities introduced in the new release of vRealize Business Standard that is rolling out alongside the automation suite. The update also brings reporting functionality meant to make it easier for administrators to report costs, current as well as projected, to decision-makers,

And rounding out the launch is a new extensibility component in vRealize Automation that VMware can enable organizations to add their own custom functionality without making modifications to the core code. That makes the developers’ work easier and simplifies on-going maintenance. 

Photo via Adina Voicu