While there have been lot of blogs already focused on the vRA 7.3 announcement.let’s focus on the ones which were mostly awaited.

Parameterized Blueprints to Enhance Re-usability and Reduce Sprawl​

• Introduced component profiles for defining both size and image attributes, enabling “T-shirt sizing” as a request item
  • Component profiles provided for image and virtual machine size including CPU, memory, and storage size
• Efficiently manage blueprints by leveraging abstracted component profiles
• Increase re-usability while significantly reducing blueprint sprawl
• Trigger approval policies on size or image conditions
• Import or export of component profiles using vRealize CloudClient
• Automatically substitute component profile values

Policy-Based Optimization of Virtual Machine Placement

• Maximize your infrastructure investment by optimizing placement.
• Combine vRealize Automation governance with performance based insight to optimize placement
• Place Virtual Machines according to performance goals, using multiple algorithms
  • Balance for maintaining maximum headroom in case of spikes
  • Consolidate to leave space for large workloads

Enhanced Control of NSX-Provisioned Load Balancers

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

Configuration Automation Framework – Puppet Integration

• Configuration management as first-class citizen
  • Make plug-in invisible to customers and enable actions in the blueprint design canvas
  • Ability to drag-and-drop configuration management notes and dynamically assign roles on the design canvas
• First implementation with Puppet
  • Register Puppet Master as an endpoint
  • Drag-and-drop Puppet node
  • Dynamically query Puppet Master, environment, and roles
• Support late binding and early binding options
• Support post-provisioning actions, such as unregister and delete

Improvements to Installation, Upgrade, Migration

• New installation API extensions
  • Trigger initial content creation
  • Invoke self-signed certificate generation
  • Certificate replacement in vRealize Automation, IaaS web, and IaaS Microsoft SQL
• New upgrade API extensions
  • List all available versions for upgrade
  • Get download status of upgrade packages
  • Do pre-upgrade check for the selected version
  • Get approximate upgrade time estimation
  • Get status progress of the upgrade
• Migration
  • Automated migration from vRealize Automation 7.x to 7.3
• Ability to a generate certificate signing request (CSR) in install wizard

REST API Improvements  (Important)

• Use case based REST API samples using Postman for many of the commonly used vRealize Automation use cases now available on GitHub
• New and Improved Swagger documentation for all of the vRealize Automation REST APIs available on code.vmware.com
• Enhanced vRealize Automation Programming Guide providing information about the vRealize Automation REST APIs that is easier to use and navigate

Improvements to High Availability

• Automated failover of PostgreSQL database
• Automated failover of IaaS Manager Service
• Enhanced RabbitMQ recovery
• Support for multiple NICs in the vRealize Automation appliance

Enhanced vRealize Business for Cloud Integration – Cloud Management Platform

• Consistent terminology across vRealize Automation and vRealize Business for Cloud
• No derived costing in vRealize Automation – vRealize Business for Cloud is the single source of truth for all pricing information
• Accurate pricing for fault-tolerant enabled machines and Azure blueprints
• Pricing updated after these post-provisioning actions:
  • Reconfigure machine
  • Scale-in or scale-out
  • Import machine

Audit Logging

• Audit logging framework object types:
  • Workflow Subscription
  • Fabric Groups
  • Endpoints (Infrastructure)
• Send audit logs to vRealize Log Insight or syslog server using Log Insight agent
• Configurable retention period

Syntax Highlighting for Software Life-cycle Scripts

• Enhanced interface
  • Elegant syntax highlighting for software life-cycle scripts (app authoring)
  • Improves productivity and reduces scripting errors

Extended External IPAM Vendor Framework

• Added support for on-demand NAT networks
• Supports one-to-many and one-to-one static IP addresses

Endpoint Configuration Service – Streamlined Endpoint Management

• Enhanced to support a schema-driven user interface
• Provides greater capability, control, and a unified experience when managing endpoints in vRealize Automation
• Allows configuration of endpoints that require inter-endpoint relationships
• Enhanced UI controls and customer experience
  • NSX is now a separate endpoint, no longer part of the vSphere endpoint configuration
  • Endpoint configuration validation checks for valid URL, credentials, and certificates
  • Certification trust verification
  • Displays certificate details when an endpoint is using untrusted certificates
  • Ability to accept self-signed certificates

Azure Public Cloud Service Design Enhancements

• 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
• Pre-populated forms and dropdowns

vRealize Orchestrator Control Center RBAC

• All users are able to log in, not just the root user
• Trace execution and logs for workflow-based vRealize Automation requests, based on user role
• Troubleshoot requests based on user role
• Reuse and extend privileges and roles from vRealize Automation

IT Process Automation with Updated SDDC Support

• All storage policy based objects are now accessible through API in vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Automation
• New vCenter Server plug-in provided with vRealize Orchestrator
• Updated AMQP, REST and PowerShell plug-ins

vRealize Automation and ServiceNow Enhancements

• View and request AWS catalog items from the ServiceNow portal
• Seamless integration with the ServiceNow governance engine
• CMDB and post-provisioning actions support
• Supported for vRealize Automation 7.3 and ServiceNow Helsinki and Istanbul

VMware Admiral Integration 

With the adoption of containers,Cloud-native,micro-services this enhances VMware commitment to developer community.

• Supports collaboration between cloud administrators and development teams for traditional, containerized, and hybrid applications
• Enables a balance between the operational control of traditional applications and the flexibility that containers offer
• New capabilities including persistent volume support, improved container networking, and host management