VMGuru

The waiting is over! VMware released the magic sauce, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager or vRSLCM is a standard part of the vRealize Suite and it is included with a vRealize Suite license. vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager allows you to quickly install and configure a brand new vRealize deployment or upgrade an existing vRealize environment. Besides that, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager delivers health monitoring, patch management, configuration management, drift remediation and upgrades to the entire vRealize Suite.

Until now, you had to manage the installation and upkeep of the vRealize product portfolio by managing each of the individual product components separately. Installation and configuration of the entire vRealize Suite could take a day to even multiple days depending on the environment. vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager unifies all of the suite management tasks into a single console. This greatly enhances the manageability of the suite and reduces the ongoing work required. Additionally it significantly reduces inputs and interactions on the part of the administrator, while the automation ensures error free repeatability.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager is a single appliance which you can download here.

Installation and upgrade

Installation or upgrade includes pre-checks and validation across the SDDC stack including compatibility, environment and entitlement checks. Installation into development, test and production environments and across all of your data centers can be completely managed by a single vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager instance. This will reduce the installation time of the vRealize Suite from days to hours.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager includes a validation of the input values to prevent problems like using invalid names, unsupported characters, etc. This should reduce any problems related to false input values. Although vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager validates the input values, it does not perform the prerequisite check for the vRealize Automation IaaS server Windows setup (yet). You should perform this before starting the installation using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.

You can manually input the required values or you can use a JSON template. You can also export the entire configuration of an environment into a JSON template and use this template to easily replicate the environment.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager supports the current versions in the vRealize Suite and one version back. So at this moment, it supports vRealize Automation 7.2/7.3, vRealize Operations 6.5/6.6, vRealize Log Insight 4.4/4.5 and vRealize Business for Cloud 7.2/7.3.

You can download the ova files manually and place them on local NFS storage or you can configure your My VMware account and download the required files automatically. Configuring the My VMware account also enables automatic input of the require license keys.

Configuration management and drift remediation

Using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager configuration drift across environments is a thing of the past. You can perform configuration management for the entire vRealize Suite and report against baseline configurations. You can also push configuration changes to all environments and track changes over time. Additionally tracking issues and triaging problems is simplified with unified logs.

Health Monitoring using Lifecycle Manager

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager enables easy monitoring the health of vRealize Suite deployment across data centers and dev/test/production environments. By leveraging and integrating with vRealize Operations SDDC Health, you will be alerted when problems arise, so to quickly diagnose and troubleshoot the issue.

In addition, customers get the added benefit of deploying recommended reference architecture and VMware Validated Designs (VVD). These validated designs help ensure that the deployment is optimized for scale, performance, and ultimately reduce future headaches in managing the vRealize Suite.

This is a big piece in VMware’s efforts to make the vRealize products more user friendly, easier to install, reduce the time-to-value and in my opinion they/we did an amazing job! I’m proud to be a very small part of the VMware Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU).