VMware refreshed its vRealize suite, and among the updates, it now optimizes workload placement between private and public clouds.

VMware created vRealize about six years ago to help its customers manage their virtual machine (VM) environments. After customers attained 60- to 80-percent virtualization, they needed help with such things as capacity and operational challenges, said Darren Orzechowski, senior director of marketing of cloud management with VMware.

In the last two to three years, vRealize has expanded beyond managing vSphere on-premises to also managing its customers applications in Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure environments, “Customers can use the same vRealize tools from their VMware environments as they provision out to cloud,” said Orzechowski.

The VMware vRealize Suite enables customers to manage and provision at scale — compute, network, storage, and application services across hybrid cloud environments.

This week VMware announced a portfolio-wide refresh to vRealize to further help its customers adopt hybrid clouds, distributing their applications across both public and private clouds.

One of the highlights of the refresh is a new automated workload balancing functionality. With it, customers can do cost comparisons to place workloads on-premises in their VMware-based private cloud or in AWS and Azure public clouds.

In addition to placing workloads in the most cost-effective manner, the new vRealize Operations 6.6 does fully automated workload balancing and placement.

In the announcement of the updates to vRealize, Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Cloud Management Business Unit, said, “VMware is committed to supporting our customers’ digital transformation initiatives by helping them to modernize their data centers as well as integrate their public clouds.”

This comment is similar to statements from HPE this week at its Discover event in Las Vegas. HPE is working on a project, internally named Project New Stack, that will help IT departments bridge their on-premise, private cloud ecosystems to public clouds. In a blog posting, Ric Lewis, general manager of HPE’s software-defined and cloud group, said, “Helping customers succeed in this hybrid IT environment is a key strategic pillar for HPE.”