Preface
DynamicOps originated at Credit Suisse. Its software was initially developed at Credit Suisse's Global Research and Development Group in 2005 to help the company address the operational and governance challenges of rolling out virtualization technology. In 2008, after having deployed and used the software to manage thousands of its virtual machines, Credit Suisse decided to form a company based on the technology to form a new company—DynamicOps. Operations Virtualization is a foundational technology for DynamicOps' cloud offerings. Operations Virtualization is an abstraction layer between the multiple management systems that make up a cloud infrastructure and their consumers. It allows IT staff to apply management to the layers below without the layers above needing to know how or why. Later in July 2012, DynamicOps was acquired by VMware and the product was renamed to vCenter Automation Center (vCAC). With version 6.2 of vCAC, the product has been renamed to vRealize Automation (vRA) to align with their new strategies.
If there's one thing people should know about vRA, it's that it enables customers of any knowledge level to consume the cloud resources you give them access to. At the end of the day, customers don't care where a machine gets spun up as long as it's fast and it will do what they want. That means there's an approval in the request process, but then it goes off to one of the many hypervisor or cloud vendors we support. Imagine not having to put your cloud admins to work to build VMs daily, while at the same time they are getting deprovisioned automatically so that you don't have to buy hardware as often—that's the goal: ease of use for the customer, cost savings for the organization.
Today, the main value that vRA adds is the ability to manage and automate multiple cloud management tools (vSphere, RHEL KVM, AWS, and so on) as well as provision to physical hardware (through UCS, iDRAC, and iLO) to build manageable hybrid cloud, private cloud, virtual desktop, and platform as a service environments. That's a pretty large feat in itself, and you can bet that there are plans to add even more value to this product as it further integrates into the VMware suite of products.
