Sunday, April 18, 2021

What's new in vRealize Automation 8.4

 Last Friday vRealize Automation 8.4 was released and we are going to take a look at some of the new features. 

vRA vRO Plugin

The vRO plugin for vRA is back and it seems it is here to stay for good. This is one of the long waited come backs. There are several phases of development for the plugin and what we get now is phase 1 functionalities:

  • management of vRA on-premises and vRA Cloud hosts
  • preserver authentication to the hosts and dynamic host creation
  • REST client available allowing requests to vRA





The plugin is supported in vRA 8.3, but it has to be downloaded and installed manually. There seems to be a plan for VRO especially if we look back at support added for other languages such as Node.js, Python and PowerShell.   


Storage Enhancements

At storage level there are new features that improve visibility and management:
  • specify order in which the disks are created 
  • choose SCSI controller to which the disk is connected  
  • day 2 actions on the disks part of image template

Deploy multiple disks blueprint:





A more detailed article about disk management can be found here 

Azure Provisioning Enhancements

A series of new features is available for Azure integration:
  • support for Azure shared images 
  • Azure disk encryption set - encrypt VMs and attached disks and support 3rd party KMS 
  • Azure disk snapshot - create and mange disk snapshots with Azure deployments

ITSM Integration with ServiceNow Enhancements 

Foo those of you using ServiceNow as portal new new enhancements are brought for the integration with vRA. 
  • Support for Catalog Items which has Custom Resource (without for vRO Objects)
  • Support for Catalog Items with Custom Day 2 actions
  • Ability to customize vRA Catalog by adding Edit Box and Drop down in ServiceNow.
  • Ability to add to attach a script to these fields.
  • Deployment Details on available in ServicePortal
If you are using on-premises ServiceNow the integration this is not yet validated (seems it's on the way though).

Enhancements to Configuration Management Tools

The configuration management eco-system supported with vRA also got its enhancements (Puppet, SaltStack, Ansible)

This was just a short overview of the new features brought in by vRA 8.4. The full list can be read in the release notes.

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