Choosing the Best VMware Automation Tool

Many companies are looking to deliver IT services and applications that are faster and more efficient to their customers. Majority of the virtualization servers aim to eliminate the burden of maintaining physical hardware.

CIO Review

Many companies are looking to deliver IT services and applications that are faster and more efficient to their customers. Majority of the virtualization servers aim to eliminate the burden of maintaining physical hardware. But, many IT administrators and managers find it challenging to handle the ever-growing number of virtual assets. This is because IT organizations fail to choose automation tool that exclusively addresses their requirement. VMware enables enterprises and organizations to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase business agility and data center efficiency.

VMware automation tools help to accomplish a task in a shorter duration of time and with less intervention from IT. VMware releases plenty of automation products that an administrator can use to get the job done with ease of implementing, maintaining, and backing up a virtual machine. One such product is the vRealize Orchestrator and vSphere—infused with policy-based functionality, VVOLs. Also, many Admins leverage vSphere PowerCLI to construct their own scripts to handle routing tasks from the command line.

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VMware experts say that hyper-converged and converged systems are becoming more of a norm. The next big thing now is automation. The investment will be worth of the output as automation not only saves time for an engineer but also brings the much much-needed and standardization of service.

vRealize Orchestrator

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), formerly called vCenter Orchestrator automates the delivery of personalized applications, infrastructure, and custom IT services. It can also go beyond server team services and automate firewall rules, backup schedules and storage.

vCloud Automation Center

vCloud Automation Center is the one of the prime ways to handle your cloud. VMware's cloud management software tool comes in three editions and provides administrators a utility to control VM sprawl and automate application delivery. VMware has been renamed to vRealize Automation as part of a rebranding strategy.

vRealize Business Enterprise

It is an IT management tool that controls the financial aspects of the organization providing transparency and control over the quality and costs of IT services. The tool enables CIOs to align IT with the business and to hasten IT transformation. The features of the tool include Business Management for the cloud, IT benchmarking, IT financial management, service quality management, cloud costing from a single dashboard. vRealize Business Enterprise offers all features that is essential for the financial aspects of an enterprise.

vSphere and vSphere with Operations Management

The vSphere platform is one of the best and ideal foundations for your applications, cloud and business. It helps to get the efficiency, best performance, and availability from your infrastructure and applications. It also lays ideal foundation for any cloud surroundings. vSphere with Operations Management transforms virtualization to the next level with its intelligent operations management. It offers better insights, leading in improved performance and availability. For example, in data center consolidation and business continuity, vSphere simplifies data center operations, decreases both CapEx and OpEx costs through virtualization, and increases business efficiency. It also supports remote office and branch office with little or no local IT staff.

VMware PowerCLI

It is a free and flexible tool. VMware's vSphere PowerCLI can automate vSphere and vCloud management. It is one of the automation tools that administrators can add to their arsenal. IT managers can tap into PowerShell cmdlets to perform commands across their environment’s virtual inventory. VMware’s Cloud Suite and other features limit what Admins can do with infrastructure options, but PowerCLI commands provide Admins with their ability to perform any process.

Which Option is Right for You?

VMware provides three CLI options—vSphere CLI, PowerCLI and ESXi Shell—to run commands in a vSphere environment. It is simply a matter of your comfort, to choose the better fit for your need. For example, when you need to integrate VMware with other native Linux-type commands like grep and sed—use vCLI. ESXi Shell can be used when performing troubleshooting. For reporting and automation, you can employ PowerCLI. In all the way, the result will be the same, no matter what CLI option you choose.

Though, VMware’s updates are useful for the enterprises for their virtual machines. There are areas that VMware needs to make improvements with automation in authentication and authorization and centralized management. Experts say that VMware should also work to develop a configuration dashboard that allows administrators to have a convenient overview of how the system is configured. Such a central overview would also help the security of the entire virtualization platform and automation system.

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