vRealize Automation 7.5 – Quick Overview

/ vnuggets

Now that VMworld 2018 has passed (at least for the US) screenshots of vRA 7.5 are out in the wild so I can take a few minutes here to cover some of the changes/additions since vRA 7.4.

The UI

VMware products are being aligned to the Clarity UI design to give a consistent look and feel across the product suite. It makes the product interface look fresher and cleaner.

vRA 7.5 Catalog

The menu items mostly stay the same however you will notice the requests and items tabs are no longer visible. This is because they have been (on the surface) collapsed into one now tab called “Deployments”.

vRA 7.5 Deployments

The “Deployments” tab has extensive filtering options on a pop-out menu allowing the user to filter deployments based on their status. A failed request still shows as a deployment object but you can “dismiss” it from view.

vRA 7.5 Dismiss Deployment

You can get further details from a deployment by clicking on the hyperlink.

vRA 7.5 deployment details

All requests are now stored under the “Administration” tab in “Request History”. This functions the same as the old “Requests” tab in vRA 7.0-7.4.

vRA 7.5 Request History

Containers

We can now add PKS clusters by defining fully supported PKS endpoints natively within vRA and then adding PKS clusters from that endpoint.

vRA 7.5 PKS Endpoint

vRA 7.5 PKS Cluster

NSX-T

NSX-T on-demand networking is now available on the design canvas. You will see these options appear in the canvas options however you won’t be able to configure them unless you have added the appropriate NSX-T endpoint first.

vRA 7.5 NSX-T

Ansible

Just like Puppet integration which was added in previous versions, vRA 7.5 now has the capability to add an Ansible template as a software component from an Ansible Tower onto the design canvas. To do this you still need a 3rd party vRO plugin (from SovLabs https://sovlabs.com/products/ansible-tower/) which has an associated licensing cost which is used to provide the designer integration to Ansible Tower.

Overall Usability

One of things that I most appreciate are the subtle changes in option grouping and placement within the UI. Things seem to be in much more intuitive places where as i previous versions I would always be hoping between tabs and sub-menus to find things, no matter how long I had been using the product.

Overall, thumbs up!