As we are heading into an era of digital transformation, it’s extremely critical for organizations to keep up with the changes and disruptions that are taking place within the tech industry. They have come to learn that the management plane is one of the most critical element when it comes to their infrastructure. This holds good for any organization whether they are looking at modernizing their datacenters, empowering their digital workspace or are trying to transform their traditional networking using software defined constructs.
Every organization, independent of the verticals they belong to, are looking at minimizing the time they invest in bringing up the underlying infrastructure and spending more time in driving innovation on the other layers of the datacenter. While a cloud environment brings flexibility and freedom to the end-users in the way they provision and consume the resources out of their datacenters, only the IT department and the cloud administrators know the pain of building and maintaining the cloud environment that caters to the needs of their Line of Businesses.
Some of the challenges that the cloud administrators face are :
- The deployment of the environment gets complex when it has to cater to a large set of end-users
- There are many points of integration between the products that perform separate functionalities and the administrators spend a lot of time in switching between different screens during the deployment
- If something goes wrong during the deployment, they need a roll-back mechanism that will help them revert to the initial state or even resume the installation once they fix the pre-requisite task that they missed during the preparation phase
vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) address all of the above issues and more. It simplifies and streamlines the deployment of vRealize Suite of products and cuts down the deployment and integration time between the products in a considerable manner.
Source: VMware whitepaper
One of the many benefits this brings to the table is the time to value while deploying the vRealize products. This is made possible by reducing the context switches between individual products. The administrator provides all the details relating to the deployment of the components and vRSLCM does a silent install of all the components. Unlike the conventional method of deployment, users get to resume and retry if something fails or a pre-requisite was not taken care of during the preparation stage.
Another advantage is that the tool also provides a single management pane for multiple deployments of vRealize environments, independent of their location and geo. This reduces the on-going management overhead of the cloud deployments. This holds good for both greenfield deployments performed by the tool and the environments that were deployed before and brought under the tool. Administrators can do patching, upgrading and configuration drift management through vRSLCM.
All this is done without deviating from the best practices VMware prescribes it’s customers to follow while deploying the cloud environments. The vRSLCM comes with inbuilt support for VVD 4.1 and all the deployments follow this standard implicitly.
The tool also lets the administrators categorize the deployments as Test, Staging, Development, and Production for easy management and isolation of the environments.
Source: VMware whitepaper
I believe this tool will change the way we deploy products and we might see more capability incorporated into this tool in the upcoming releases. To sum up, vRSLCM provides single pane view of the entire setup, thereby freeing customer resources to focus on business-critical initiatives, while improving time to value, reliability, and consistency across all their vRealize deployments. Give it a try and let me know what you think.