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