7.4

Introducing vRealize Automation
IT organizations can use VMware vRealize ™ Automation to deliver services to their lines of business.
vRealize Automation provides a secure portal where authorized administrators, developers, or business
users can request new IT services and manage specific cloud and IT resources, while ensuring
compliance with business policies. Requests for IT services, including infrastructure, applications,
desktops, and many others, are processed through a common service catalog to provide a consistent
user experience.
To improve cost control, you can integrate vRealize Business for Cloud with your vRealize Automation
instance to expose the month-to-date expense of cloud and virtual machine resources, and help you
better manage capacity, price, and efficiency.
Note Beginning with version 7.3, vRealize Automation supports only vRealize Business for Cloud
version 7.3 and later.
Providing On-Demand Services to Users Overview
You can use the IaaS, Software, and XaaS features of vRealize Automation to model custom on-demand
IT services and deliver them to your users through the vRealize Automation common service catalog.
You use blueprints to define machine deployment settings. Published blueprints become catalog items,
and are the means by which entitled users provision machine deployments. Catalog items can range in
complexity from a single, simple machine with no guest operating system to complex custom application
stacks delivered on multiple machines under an NSX load balancer with networking and security controls.
You can create and publish blueprints for a single machine deployment, or a single custom XaaS
resource, but you can also combine machine blueprints and XaaS blueprints with other building blocks to
design elaborate application blueprints that include multiple machines, networking and security, software
with full life cycle support, and custom XaaS functionality. You can also control deployment settings by
using a parameterized blueprint, which allows you to specify pre-configured size and image settings at
request time. Because all published blueprints and blueprint components are reusable, you can create a
library of these components and combine them in new nested blueprints to deliver increasingly complex
on-demand services.
Published blueprints become catalog items that your service catalog administrators can deliver to your
users. The service catalog provides a unified self-service portal for consuming IT services. Service
catalog administrators can manage user access to catalog services, items, and actions by using
entitlements and approvals, and users can browse the catalog to request items they need, track their
requests, and manage their provisioned items.
Foundations and Concepts
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