Five key benefits that improve operational efficiency.
Streamline Hybrid Cloud Management
Self-driving operations delivers a simple, yet powerful solution that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate and streamline hybrid cloud management.
Hybrid cloud is a great solution for organizations that are on an IT modernization pathway. Yet expanding into hybrid cloud can bring a range of challenges, including inefficiencies, lack of visibility and wasted resources. As complexity grows, IT operators need extra support just to maintain business as usual, leaving little time to maximize the benefits of hybrid cloud. Self-driving operations leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to boost IT efforts and help optimize hybrid cloud operations. VMware Cloud Foundation™ provides self-driving operations, delivering five key benefits that streamline the way your IT organization manages hybrid cloud.
Challenges That Can Plague Hybrid Cloud
With its scalability and flexibility, hybrid cloud is an effective way for organizations to respond to the demands of modernized IT. Yet the mix of private cloud, public cloud and edge environments can come at a cost for IT teams responsible for infrastructure operations and monitoring.
The challenges of managing a more complex IT environment include new skills requirements, poor visibility, slow remediation, and wasted resources. From infrastructure up through the application tiers, hybrid cloud can introduce increased complexity with more diverse tasks for IT operations teams to manage. This complexity creates more opportunities for mistakes.
Enable Self-Driving Operations with Machine Learning
To avoid the cost and risk of managing complex environments, leading IT organizations are looking for computer intelligence assisted approaches to streamline operations management.
Self-driving operations is a simple, yet powerful solution that uses AI/ML to automate and streamline hybrid cloud management. It provides continuous and automated closed-loop analytics and optimization. The system monitors both infrastructure and applications, looking for patterns and anomalies – and fixes them quickly.
With a self-driving operational model, your IT team can confidently scale up and out from your on-premises data center, without having to bring on extra resources to manage the increased complexity. Instead, the AI and ML powerhouse does the job of predicting, preventing, and intelligently re-mediating issues.
With its focus on optimization, self-driving operations are one component of a successful hybrid cloud operations strategy.
VMware Cloud Foundation Makes Self-Driving a Reality
VMware has a unique and powerful hybrid cloud solution for IT operators called VMware Cloud Foundation. It provides virtualized and programmatic infrastructure, as well as operations and automation tools, that work everywhere you deploy and manage workloads – in your private cloud, public cloud and edge environments.
Existing on-premises VMware deployments can be expanded to deliver both virtualization and container management services. New cloud deployments built on VMware solutions, provide migration, on-demand capacity, and application modernization options that make hybrid cloud a powerful reality. VMware Cloud Foundation provides a single solution everywhere, that meets business needs without needing a separate and different infrastructure and operations solution in each environment.
VMware Cloud Foundation delivers self-driving operations that optimize across all environments, and includes these market-leading solutions:
- vRealize® Operations™ continuously and automatically optimizes performance and capacity via predictive and real-time analytics. It helps IT oversee the entire hybrid cloud via a unified operations platform.
- vRealize® Network Insight™ builds an optimized, highly available and secure network infrastructure within and between environments. With complete visibility across the network, it is used to discover, optimize and troubleshoot application security and network connectivity from the private cloud, public cloud and edge.
Together, vRealize Operations and vRealize Network Insight enable true self-driving capabilities – significantly reducing the cost and complexity of managing hybrid cloud.
Five Key Benefits of VMware Self-driving Operations
With hybrid cloud, you can access powerful cloud services and tap into near-infinite pay-as-you-go resource pools without draining your own IT resources or compromising security. Self-driving operations should be a central part of your hybrid strategy, and will enable you to unlock the true power of hybrid cloud and deliver a number of key benefits.
1. Continuous Performance Optimization
With hybrid cloud, you can augment your data center capacity with public cloud capacity whenever you need it. With self-driving operations, the task of choosing where to place each workload in the optimal environment for performance is automated and optimized. Disaster recovery decisions can be automated as well.
The net effect is a reduced burden on your IT team and improved performance of your apps and network. Using VMware vRealize Operations, key tasks are taken care of by:
- Automatic and continuous balancing of workloads across clusters in private cloud or on public cloud, such as VMware CloudTM on AWS.
- Optimizing the balancing of workloads for business or operational intent such as cost, performance, software license management, or consolidation.
- Analyzing and predicting future demand and proactively moving workloads to avoid resource bottlenecks.
All this automation minimizes the need for manual monitoring and troubleshooting, improving uptime while allowing IT teams to focus on value-adding activities and growth.
2. Efficient Capacity Planning and Cost Management
Pay-per-use public cloud provides a compelling OpEx alternative to CapEx investment in costly data center infrastructure. Yet to achieve true cost savings, you need a clear picture of how each resource is being used and how much they are costing the business.
Self-driving operations provide the intelligent analysis needed to view and manage resource usage. It automates and optimizes reclamation and right-sizing, balancing workloads and improving your existing capacity. The solution pin-points over provisioned or idle capacity, and can then optimize for cost. Using capacity modeling and what-if scenarios, you can forecast the impact of adding a workload to an application across private and public clouds.
Armed with the insights and capabilities of vRealize Operations, you can run your infrastructure like a public cloud – reducing costs by automatically right-sizing virtual machines and reclaiming resources.
3. Intelligent Remediation
Hybrid cloud can be complex. This increased complexity can make it harder to correlate logs and metrics; and to find actionable insights that can help you troubleshoot faster.
With ML at its core, self-driving operations will gather and correlate metrics and logs with unified observability from applications to infrastructure. This means centralized IT operations teams will get a holistic, unified view of hybrid environments that enables 360-degree IT operations troubleshooting with logs and metrics side-by-side and in context.
What’s more, vRealize Operations can automatically remediate issues before they impact your applications.
The result is reduced downtime, streamlined monitoring and IT operations troubleshooting, and unified operations across private and public clouds.
4. Integrated Compliance
Managing compliance can be a challenge in hybrid cloud environments. It is easy to specify a policy or preferred configuration that ensures you meet security and regulatory needs. But it can be hard to consistently apply policies and configurations across private cloud, public cloud and the edge,
Self-driving operations take care of compliance for you. It consistently enforces IT and regulatory standards with integrated compliance and automated drift remediation in any environment, to ensure you stay compliant with changing conditions. Using cluster, host and VM compliance dashboards, you can compare the conditions of your environments with a wide range of common compliance standards. If drift is detected, automated workflows can restore conditions to get your systems back on track.
With vRealize Operations, this continuous monitoring of both private and public cloud compliance stature – plus the ability to automate drift remediation – provides peace of mind for IT operations teams tasked with maintaining rigorous standards.
5. Secure Network Optimization
As your IT operations expand to incorporate private cloud, public cloud and edge, network visibility and security both within and between environments becomes even more critical.
vRealize Network Insight delivers the visibility you need across your network. You can ensure performance and compliance, and achieve greater security with microsegmentation across VMware NSX®, VeloCloud, VMware Cloud on AWS, and native AWS and Azure.
What’s more, you can discover connectivity between overlay and underlay networks, troubleshoot application and network performance, and analyze flows to help identify traffic anomalies. And, vRealize Network Insight can identify application dependencies before migrating your applications to the cloud.
Enhanced network visibility and analytics will improve security across your on-premises and cloud infrastructures. The result is accelerated troubleshooting, optimized performance by eliminating bottlenecks, and reduced business risk in application migration. You can manage and scale your NSX deployments with confidence.
Optimize Operations and Reduce Costs with VMware Hybrid Cloud Solutions
VMware Cloud Foundation delivers the infrastructure and operational consistency that IT operations teams now demand in increasingly complex environments. It deploys automation and operations management tools everywhere, including private cloud, public cloud, and the edge.
By making the most of the self-driving operational model that is built into VMware Cloud Foundation, you can leverage the power of AI/ML to optimize hybrid cloud operations.
VMware offers a rapidly evolving mix of options to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation. It can be installed, it is available pre-installed on hyperconverged infrastructure, and it is compatible with all six hyperscale cloud providers and 4,300 VMware Cloud ProviderTM Partners. Some components are also available as SaaS solutions.
VMware Cloud Foundation: Provides a simple path to the hybrid cloud, leveraging a common infrastructure and consistent operational model from on-premises to public cloud and edge. It includes VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX and vRealize Suite.
VMware vRealize® Suite: VMware hybrid cloud management platform enables IT operations to deliver a self-service private or hybrid cloud with automation, governance, and consistent operations. It includes vRealize Operations and vRealize Network Insight.
VMware vRealize Operations: Delivers self-driving operations from applications to infrastructure, helping organizations to optimize, plan, manage and scale their private and hybrid clouds.
VMware vRealize Network Insight: Enables pervasive and consistent application visibility and analytics from the data center to the cloud to the edge. It enables IT operations to build an optimized, highly available and secure network infrastructure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
VMware Cloud on AWS: Deploys VMware Cloud Foundation on AWS infrastructure, and delivers a seamless hybrid cloud solution from vSphere to AWS Cloud.
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