vRealize Automation 8.5

 VMware recently announced general availability of vRealize Automation 8.5. 

Generally speaking, vRealize Automation 8.5 adds capabilities focusing on the areas of multi-cloud support with Azure, extensibility with vRealize Orchestrator and ABX as well as expansion of network automation capabilities with vSphere and NSX.

What’s new in vRealize Automation 8.5

• Project Administrator can act as Approver for all approval requests – When creating an approval policy, administrators can select a Project Administrator (for the project in which the approval was triggered) as the approver.
• Configure when IP address from IPAM is released – You can configure how long it takes for an IP address to be released from allocation once it is no longer used. This allows for faster provisioning of new workloads where IP addresses are scarce.
• Limit the number of namespaces for a project on a Kubernetes zone – The maximum number of supervisor namespaces that can be deployed for the project on a given K8s zone now has a configurable limit.
• VMware vRealize Orchestrator plug-in for vRealize Automation 8.5 – The updated vRealize Automation plug-in supports scripting objects generation such as cloud accounts, cloud zones, projects, tags, and CRUD operations to build your own content.
• Enable resources across Azure regions to be added to the same resource group – An Azure resource group is created in an Azure region. However, resources from any Azure region can be added into it. This feature enables admins to add resources from other regions into the Azure RG.
• Snapshot management for Azure disks – You can now pass the resource group name, encryption set, and network policy while creating the disk snapshot.
• Ability to enable/disable boot diagnostics for Azure VMs – You can enable/disable boot diagnostics for Azure VMs as a day 2 action.
• Support for NSX-V to NSX-T migration with vSphere 6.7 – vRealize Automation NSX-V to NSX-T migration now supports migrating deployments that are running on vSphere 6.7.
• Support for existing global security group as part of NSX-T Federation – vRealize Automation can now discover global security groups configured under NSX-T global manager. These groups can be leveraged in network profiles and VMware Cloud Templates to build deployments.
• Custom Roles API – The APIs for Custom Roles (RBAC) are now available (Create, Read, List, Update, Delete).
• Notifications – The Service Broker administrator can view the list of available email notification scenarios and enable or disable them for all users in their organization.
• Terraform runtime environment authentication – This release introduces authentication for adding Terraform service runtime version to vRA for more secure environments.