vRealize Automation 8.1 has arrived

vRealize Automation (vRA) 8.1 has arrived! Well not quite yet ? VMware announced VMware Tanzu including vSphere 7 and vRA 8.1 on Tuesday 10th March.

vRealize Automation (vRA) 8.1 (along with vSphere 7) should be GA (general availability) around 1st May 2020. Keep checking back here or subscribe to my RSS feed for updates.

When vRA 8 arrived it completely changed the architecture from vRA 7 and made the move towards features such as Cloud agnostic blueprints. The problem with vRealize Automation 8 was some of the dropped features which were widely used in vRA 7, things such as approval policies, not to mention vRealize Automation 8 was not multi-tenancy.

With the release of vRealize Automation 8.1 a lot of those features are coming back which makes vRA 8.1 well worth being looked at to upgrade from vRA 7. The new features for vRA 8.1 include (but not limited to):

• vSphere 7 support
• Multi-tenancy
• Approval Policies
• XaaS (Anything as a Service)
• Custom Properties
• Property Groups
• Pricing for Hybrid Cloud (via vRealize Operations integration)
• Powershell for ABX

The “Pricing for Hybrid Cloud” will be an interesting one to see; having looked at both vRB (vRealize for Business) and CloudHealth and neither fulfilling the average Cloud provider billing requirements, I wait with anticipation.

Once vRA 8.1 is released and I have deployed it I will follow up with some blog post(s) on some of the features of vRA 8.1. Until then we all have to wait for the release ?