Yesterday VMware announced version 7 of both its vCloud and vRealize suites, confirming its efforts to be relevant in the CMPs (Cloud Management Platforms) space.
vRealize Suite 7 is made of a mix and match of new products and solutions already available on the market: vRealize Automation 7, vRealize Operations 6.2, vRealize Business for Cloud 7 and vRealize Log Insight 3.3.
vCloud Suite 7, now aligned with its management counterpart, is the bundle with vSphere Enterprise Plus (for vCloud Suite).
The big news coming with these releases is the introduction of a brand new Portable Licensing Unit (PLU) which can be used to license on premises vSphere CPUs or Operating System Instances (OSIs) across other hypervisors and supported public cloud providers.
How does it works? A single PLU entitles you to manage unlimited OSIs that runs on a single CPU on vSphere (so CPU based licensing) or 15 OSIs running in other environments (VM based licensing). When a VM migrate from an environment to another vRealize/vCloud automatically switches the metric accordingly to the new placement, which, on papers, makes it a very effective solution.
What is still unclear is the possibility to use a single PLU on multiple third-party providers because this feature could be the make or break of the success of the news suites.