What is included in the VMware vCloud Suite?
The VMware vCloud solution package includes VMware vSphere for server virtualization including vSphere Enterprise Plus hypervisor, as well as the VMware vRealize Suite Hybrid Cloud Management Platform - with the following components:
- VMware vRealize Automation: for policy-driven infrastructures, application delivery and lifecycle management for physical, virtual and publicCloud environments
- VMware vRealize Operations: with intelligent performance, capacity and configuration management especially for environments containing components from different vendors
- VMware vRealize Business for Cloud: for automated measurement of application usage and calculation and billing of service prices in virtualized infrastructures containing components from multiple vendors
Key benefits of vCloud Suite
vCloud Suite helps organizations provision IT resources through automation and predefined policies without compromising governance and control options. Faster availability of Services provides greater flexibility and agility, benefiting specific business units in addition to developers:
- Integration of private as well as public clouds to provision and manage infrastructure and application resources via a hybridCloud.
- Software-defined infrastructure including automated provisioning of central ITServices results in greater agility in delivering resources to end users.
- Increased efficiency: With features such as intelligent workload placement and support for other advanced operations, enterprises can reduce IT costs while increasing performance and scalability.
- Developer options: Developers can leverage resources for application development through a catalog, CLI, or open APIs.
VMware vCloud Suite - Editions and Features
The VMware vCloud Suite is available in three different editions with varying levels of performance: Standard, Advance and Enterprise. Each edition includes the user-friendly vSphere Enterprise Plus hypervisor, with improved performance and availability for more transparency. The editions differ in terms of the integrated VMware vRealize Suite edition and other functions.
vCloud Standard Edition
The Standard edition supports intelligent operations management in companies that want to improve the availability and performance of applications through predictive analysis functions including intelligent notification functions.
It offers:
- vRealize Business for Cloud Standard - for comparing the cost of groups of virtual machines in the private Cloud with similar groups in a public Cloud
- Log Insight - with scalable analysis capabilities for infrastructures and applications, including fast troubleshooting
- vRealize Operations Advanced (vROps) - the platform for automated IT operations management in private, hybrid and multi-Cloud environments
vCloud Advanced Edition
The Advanced Edition includes all the features and Services of the Standard edition, plus it helps enterprises by increasing the agility, productivity and efficiency of their IT with the following component:
- vRealize Automation Enterprise - for self-service cloud provisioning, multi-Cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based infrastructure management and assurance, including unified policy and control
For the Standard Edition and the Advanced Edition, there is also the option to add VMware vRealize Operations as an add-on. Likewise, VMware NSX - the platform for network virtualization and security - is available as an optional component.
vCloud Enterprise Edition
The Enterprise edition is the most comprehensive version of the vCloud suite, and in addition to the features of the other two editions, it includes Cloud options for developers in enterprises that maintain DevOps initiatives; these include automated deployment and management of full application stacks. Specifically, the Enterprise feature set includes the following component:
- vRealize Automation Enterprise (vRA) - the powerful and easy-to-use infrastructure automation platform to deliver self-service clouds and various capabilities including consistent policies for multi-Cloud automation on a DevOps basis. vRA increases the efficiency and productivity of enterprise IT and prepares them for future challenges through accelerated time-to-market, high usability, and security and control. vRealize strengthens infrastructure through native compliance management, flexible safeguards, and immediate remediation of vulnerabilities. It also provides comprehensive support through automated IT operations management on a unified, transparent platform and efficient application and database monitoring in private, hybrid and multi-Cloud environments.
VMware vCloud Suite - Licensing
Each VMware vCloud Suite Edition is licensed Pro CPU. In addition, many components of the vCloud Suite are also available as standalone products, these are then licensed Pro virtual machine. The following should be noted: As soon as these components are purchased via the vCloud Suite, their licensing is accordingly also Pro CPU.
All components included in a vCloud edition are activated with only one license key. For example, the license key for the vCloud Standard Edition applies to all assets running it - such as ESXi hosts, vCloud Automation Center and vCloud Director. Thus, all virtual machines running on a CPU licensed with it can use all the components included in that edition.
Any number of virtual machines can run on a CPU licensed with any of the vCloud editions. However, if virtual machines are to run on CPUs that are not licensed to a vCloud suite, additional individual licenses are required for the VMware products that are to be used.