VMware updated its vRealize cloud management platform with capacity and cost management capabilities and multicloud comparison tools, among other new features.

Specifically, the vendor announced four new product releases: vRealize Operations 7.5, vRealize Network Insight 4.1, vRealize Automation 7.6, and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.1. All of these are slated for availability in VMware’s first quarter fiscal year 2020.

The new releases come on the heels of VMware’s (latest) cloud push last month that included more VMware Cloud on AWS regions, expanded multicloud management tools, and a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) device jointly engineered with Dell EMC.

The goal with these updates is to “help our customers holistically manage data centers and clouds in a way where you get this management control plane that hides all the operational complexity and breaks down operational silos, both on premises and across clouds,” said Taruna Gandhi, director of product marketing for VMware’s Cloud Management business unit.

vRealize Operations aims to enable “self-driving operations,” so that customers can take a hands-off approach to their production operations — across applications, infrastructure, and clouds. And this includes four tenants: continuous performance optimization, efficient capacity management, intelligent remediation, and integrated compliance, Gandhi said. “We continue our investment along these four value pillars,” she added.

There are several new vRealize Operations capabilities across these four categories, but some of the major ones include placement optimization for vSAN workloads by defining storage intent (think: intent-based storage) and allocation-based capacity management in addition to the existing demand-based modeling.

“This can free up a lot of resources and money for our customers,” Gandhi said.

The new release enables planning for “what-if” scenarios — things like determining the impact of adding HCI capacity to a vSAN environment, or comparing capacity and costs of moving workloads across different clouds. This new feature works across VMware Cloud on AWS, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds. It also combines with CloudHealth by VMware to provide visibility, optimization, and governance across clouds.

vRealize Operations 7.5 includes new remediation capabilities to predict and prevent application and infrastructure issues, such as Telegraf agents for application and OS monitoring. And it integrates with vSphere’s compliance and automated drift remediation capabilities to ensure compliance with public standards, or customers can create custom compliance. vSphere is VMware’s software-defined data center stack.

“Configuration and compliance for vSphere is very critical as customers are managing their data centers and looking at capacity and performance costs in a wholistic model,” Gandhi said. “Bringing in that compliance piece is very critical for our customers.”

vRealize Automation is VMware’s automation and lifecycle management platform, and the updates to the 7.6 release center around deeper integrations with vSphere and VMware’s network virtualization platform, NSX. It extends its integration with VMware NSX Data Center with new on-demand support for private networks as well as VMware NSX-T and NSX for vSphere configuration for different clusters with a single VMware vCenter Server.

The release also supports multi-tenancy in VMware vRealize Orchestrator.