vRealize Automation (vCAC) – The cost of being agile

From the archive. Originally published on dailyhypervisor.com on October 21, 2014.

Building a cloud is easy right?  There are products out there that can stand up a cloud for you in a week and automate your entire IT infrastructure practically overnight, isn’t there?  This is what some vendors would try to have you believe.  The fact is building a cloud and/or automating your IT infrastructure is very complex and each network is as unique as the DNA that sets each of us apart.

Today IT infrastructures are living breathing organisms ever evolving, growing, and adapting to the rapidly changing organizations that rely on them.  Trying to simply understand these infrastructures is a huge feat let alone automate them.  One could spend years trying to understand these infrastructures like a documentary on the nature channel.

Now I know some may say I’m biased because of my employment and my history with the vCAC product, but to them I would say I have been in this space for over 6 years and have competed against almost every cloud product on the market.  I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly and I remain where I am because from everything I have seen this is by far the most mature and agile product on the market.  As the title of this post states that comes with a cost.  That cost is nothing more than a learning curve.

A learning curve doesn’t mean that the product is complex.  vCAC is one of the only if not the only product that can give you the flexibility to customize it to suite any need you have without having to branch code and modify the core.  I’ve seen ads by competing products that state vCAC is dusty and requires professional services to implement.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Professional Services is an option if you don’t want to learn the product, but is not required which is the case with most other products out there.

This blog and the plug-ins that are available are a testament to that.  I was working with a customer a while back who asked me how much of a services effort it was to add a new network to vCAC and there was a period of silence before I told him none because I just couldn’t believe the question.  Without mentioning the product he had told me the competitors product was unable to have newly added networks available to the catalog without professional services.

To that note vCAC’s ability to integrate natively with NSX and create net new networks on the fly and make them available for use in vCAC is remarkable and beyond the capabilities of most of the other products on the market today.  Another example is InfoBlox.  Infoblox provides a drop in plug-in that enables integration between vCAC and their platform.  That’s great, but what’s even better is a few weeks ago I was working with a customer and they didn’t quiet use infoblox the way the plug-in was built.  Uh oh right?  Not at all after listening to what the needs were for about 10 minutes and making 20 minutes worth of changes to the vCO workflows it was exactly what they wanted.  The best part once they become educated they could do these types of changes on their own.

This is what Dailyhypervisor is all about.  Our goal is to educate those of you that want and need the ability to make your cloud your own, to customize it, to integrate it, to understand it in your environment and be able to tailor every last bit of it to suit your needs.  I’m not going to say it will be easy at first.  Nothing ever is, but once you learn and understand it you will be happy you chose vCAC or what is now called vRealize Automation.

Stay tuned as we continue to walk you through the configuration, customization, and integration of vCAC to help you lower the cost of being agile.  Let’s face it we all like building really cool stuff so let’s get building.