What's new in VMware vRealize Automation 8.0

Overview:

VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 is completely new codebase. With the upcoming release of vRA 8, you will have the option to choose between running a VMware supported cloud service or an on premises installation in your environment.

• The new platform is now built on container architecture. The new container-based micro services architecture of the platform will allow management, configuration, and future upgrades to be dramatically simplified when compared to previous releases.
• It is one of the best automation tool in industry which allows users to request and provision infrastructure and application resources through a self-service portal.
• The idea of vRealize Automation is to eliminate manual IT processes, through end-to-end automation with policy-based self-service.

New Architecture:

• The new architecture offers significantly improved scalability and performance, with flexible deployment options. 
• Previous versions of vRealize Automation required at least two virtual machines, including the need to run the IaaS architecture on a Windows server.  VMware vRealize Automation 8 removes the need to run Windows. 
• Additionally, all vRealize Automation services now run within a single VM with sufficient scale and performance for many customers. 
• If additional performance is needed and high availability is a requirement, vRA 8 supports a three node cluster configuration which adds scale and high availability.
• Scale can also be improved through increasing VM compute resources.
• VMware Cloud Assembly to create a cloud-agnostic blueprint that can provision our infrastructure to the cloud of our choice as well as completely deploy and configure our application using cloud-init within the blueprint.
• This cloud-agnostic blueprint allows us to provision infrastructure and deploys the application to any public or private clouds with no extra configuration.

Flexible Deployment:

• The easy installer is delivered as an ISO file with support for installation from Windows, Linux, or MacOS. 
• The built-in Marketplace includes numerous operating system, application, blueprint and image samples to kick-start the delivery of infrastructure and application resources in your environment.
• For new deployments, you can install vRealize Lifecycle Manager, vRealize Automation, and Workspace ONE Access (formerly VMware Identity Manager) directly from the easy installer.

Enhanced Integration:

• VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 is released with fully-featured new HTML 5 user interface and enhanced capability.
• vRealize 8.0 provides improved support and integration with VMware Cloud on AWS, native Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
• A powerful configuration and deployment API provides the ability to automate interactions with vRealize Automation.
• Blueprints are another core functionality of vRealize Automation offering extensive flexibility when designing and deploying OS, application, and infrastructure resources. New blueprints options provide extensive granularity, including the ability to add cloud-agnostic objects.
• Direct integrations are provided for each of the aforementioned cloud services.  Cloud agnostic and native objects are included for use within Projects, Cloud Zones, Profiles, and blueprints, making it very simple to deploy to any of the supported cloud services from a single or small number of blueprints
• Now vRealize Orchestrator component runs as a core part of vRealize Automation, now being a service within the Automation VM with end-to-end git integration.
• Action Based Extensibility (ABX) is a new option for vRealize Automation 8.0, which is an alternative to vRealize Orchestrator.  ABX provides server less automated extensibility actions using "Node.js" or Python scripts that initiate via specific triggers.
• With vRealize Automation 8 blueprints provide a declarative Infrastructure as Code experience using YAML with an improved easy to use drag and drop design canvas.

Additional Information:

• Only new deployments of vRealize Automation 8.0 are supported at this time. There is no upgrade path from a previous release of vRealize Automation 7.x to 8.0.
• There is no path to migrate from vRealize Automation 7.x at this time. Full migration service functionality is not available in vRealize Automation 8.0 but its likely to be available with vRealize Automation 8.1 release.
• VMware has added many new capabilities with the new architecture platform and all of them require a vRA  Enterprise license. But in case you require a basic IaaS and XaaS deployments to on-prem resources, you will need Advanced-level licensing.
• In vRA 8.0, multi-tenancy is not available at present. However, its likely to be reintroduced in next release. In vRA 8.0 you can even see the constructs exist for organizations. Because it will still sometime until next release is out and anyone is able to see how VMware will approach the idea of multi-tenancy. 

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