Blog
21 April, 2024
VMware’s VRA 7 has been in use by many organizations for years. VMware released vRA 8, and many people are wondering what the differences are between the two products.
vRA 7 had reached its limits in terms of features and the ability to support other applications like the public cloud, cloud-native applications, and traditional DevOps tools. Many of its automations were based on external dependencies, which made it difficult to troubleshoot and hard for users to build an automation that met their goals precisely.
But vRA 8 is built focusing on modern cloud management tools and integrations. It comes with features such as Code Stream to manage pipelines, configuration management, Guardrails, and more integrations with AWS, GCP, and Azure. With vRA 8, we can provide customers with a cloud-agnostic blueprint to manage every aspect of their public cloud. vRA 8’s many native integrations allow most features to be developed inside the system, making it much more agile and flexible and far easier to troubleshoot.
At TeraSky, we have been able to simplify and streamline processes by working in vRA 8. For example, we automated the process for an organization to onboard a new employee with the relevant equipment, permissions, distributed lists, and more. In another use case, we scaled down catalog items from over 100 items to just three by creating a custom form that would contain all the relevant information and be dynamic enough to meet all the requirements.
As long-term VMware users, we see vRA 8 as a completely new product based on the same concepts as vRA 7. To produce it, VMware created an entirely new product instead of basing it on the vRA 7. This means that moving to vRA 8 is less of an upgrade than a side-by-side migration to a new platform, and that’s how we approach it for our customers.
Moving from vRA 7 to vRA 8 offers us an opportunity to meet customer needs more closely instead of simply upgrading the existing solution. For example, VRA7 might not have been able to correctly configure some automations, but vRA 8 makes it possible. By taking time to understand what DevOps, engineers, and developers want to achieve with the solution, which often includes features that vRA 7 couldn’t deliver, we can improve their daily workflows. The flexibility of vRA 8 allows us to work with whichever tool customers prefer.
If you’ve avoided working with vRA 7 in the past, because you wanted to be more native, or more flexible, or avoid on-prem solutions, or for any reason at all, vRA 8 is the time to reconsider. TeraSky’s experts can use it to cover whatever you need and integrate everything, delivering an agile, seamless multi-cloud experience in SaaS or on-prem and serving up better cloud and network management.
Written by: Yev Berman, Head of Cloud at TeraSky