The Standard Edition of vRealize Suite comes with a learning curve, but it provides intelligent operations management via Log Insight, Business for Cloud and Operations Manager.
VMware provides three different editions of its vRealize Suite, and each one is designed to fit a particular use case. The vRealize Suite Standard Edition is intended for organizations that want to enable intelligent operations management capabilities.
It's important to note that each of the three editions -- Standard, Advanced and Enterprise -- build on one another. The Standard Edition includes vRealize Business for Cloud Standard, Log Insight and vRealize Operations Advanced, which enables the software-defined data center to monitor hybrid clouds.
The Advanced and Enterprise editions include capabilities that aren't found in the Standard Edition, such as cloud planning and vRealize Automation Advanced, which enables infrastructure automation. In addition, the Enterprise Edition adds application automation and monitoring capabilities through vRealize Automation Enterprise and vRealize Operations. VMware provides a graph illustrating the use cases for the three editions.
As previously noted, vRealize Suite Standard Edition provides intelligent operations management capabilities. The idea is that, in a large organization, there are a lot of IT resources that admins need to manage. These resources include hosts, VMs, applications and storage devices.
Furthermore, these resources might be geographically scattered, with some residing on premises while others exist in public clouds. The vRealize Suite can keep track of all these resources.
Troubleshoot issues with vRealize Log Insight
One of the major components in vRealize Suite Standard Edition is Log Insight. As its name suggests, Log Insight is a log management tool that is designed to simplify reviewing log entries across an organization's entire VMware infrastructure. Admins can use this tool to see which of the organization's VMware hosts are experiencing a particular issue.
Log management tools are nothing new. There are a number of different vendors that offer tools designed to consolidate and parse an organization's event logs. Even so, there are a couple of things in VMware's Log Insight tool that might prove useful to administrators who are tasked with keeping an eye on their organization's VMware resources.
One of the tool's more useful features is the ability to create custom dashboards. Administrators can create their own custom dashboards by cloning the visualizations used in other dashboards and queries.
Another helpful feature is the tool's extensibility via content pack dashboards. Content packs provide dashboards that are specifically designed for a particular VMware product. For example, administrators might use the vSphere content pack to gain deeper insight into their vSphere hosts.
Save money with vRealize Business for Cloud
Another component of vRealize Suite Standard Edition is vRealize Business for Cloud. This tool gives administrators a holistic view of the resources running in the public cloud and in the organization's private cloud.
This interface is designed to help IT staff make business decisions based on the availability and cost of resources. For example, an administrator might determine that it's more cost-effective to bring a particular cloud-based workload back in-house rather than letting it continue to run in the cloud.
Business for Cloud provides plenty of enlightening statistical information, but its most useful feature is its ability to perform cost comparisons.
This tool goes beyond echoing billing information that has been obtained from a cloud provider. Instead, the tool looks at seven different cost drivers, including hardware, storage on demand, licensing, maintenance, labor, network and facilities. Administrators can also add a custom cost driver for things such as backup or security-related costs.
Business for Cloud provides plenty of enlightening statistical information, but its most useful feature is its ability to perform cost comparisons. For example, the tool might show admins the price of running a new VM on their private cloud, in the AWS cloud or in VMware vCloud Air. Being able to compare prices ensures that administrators can create workloads in the most cost-effective way possible.
Take advantage of vRealize Operations Manager
The third component of vRealize Suite Standard Edition is vRealize Operations Manager. Admins should consider the Operations Manager an essential tool for any organization that depends on VMware products.
The Operations Manager offers four basic functions: optimize performance, optimize capacity, troubleshoot and manage compliance. The tool offers a number of different features related to each of these functions.
The optimize capacity function includes tools to assess capacity, reclaim resources, and plan and assess costs. Likewise, the manage compliance function includes compliance assessment tools and tools to manage the configurations of VMs, hosts, clusters and distributed switches.
