VMware updated its multicloud management software with additional automation capabilities and “what if” planning for VMware Cloud on AWS that helps customers predict demand and plan for future capacity needs across the hybrid cloud service.

VMware’s cloud management portfolio includes its CloudHealth and vRealize Cloud Management on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products.

Updates to VMware vRealize Automation 8.4 include more cloud provisioning support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. For Microsoft Azure, this release will include support for existing availability sets, custom images from an Azure image gallery, and Azure disk encryption sets. For Google Cloud, this release will support sole-tenant provisioning.

Additionally, the new release includes tighter integration with the open source Salt Project, which automates infrastructure management and configuration. Last September, VMware bought SaltStack, whose automation software is based on open source Salt. At the time, VMware said SaltStack would broaden vRealize’s automation capabilities for software configuration management, infrastructure, and networking across on-premises and cloud environments.

The new updates simplify installation, set-up, and deployment of vRealize Automation SaltStack Config via tighter integration with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager, according to the vendor.

Additionally, vRealize 8.4 expands network automation with NSX migration support to make it easier for customers to migrate workloads from NSX for vSphere to NSX-T data center environments.

And finally, integration with VMware Cloud on AWS will enable VMware Cloud on AWS customers to activate vRealize Automation Cloud with a single click and help automate the setup of the necessary cloud resources. Customers will also be able to use vRealize Automation to automate VMware Cloud on AWS security groups.

VMware also updated its vRealize Operations software, and the 8.4 version increases Amazon Web Services (AWS) support — it now supports 57 AWS services — to further automate those.

It enables better cost management by allowing customers to calculate the cost of their VMware Cloud on AWS virtual machines (VMs) and clusters using their VMware Cloud on AWS bills. This includes running reports and tracking the potential savings of reclamation from powered off VMs, idle VMs, VM snapshots, orphaned disks, and oversized VMs. Additionally, customers can now produce a single dashboard spanning VMware Cloud on AWS and on-premises VMware vSphere costs.

And it adds support for open source Telegraf agent. This allows customers to pull metrics from any app using any of the open source Telegraf agent plugins or by developing their own. Plus, customers can monitor these apps anywhere whether they are running in a VMware environment or on bare-metal servers.

The updates come as Flexera’s latest cloud benchmark finds that VMware Cloud on AWS is the No. 5 public cloud provider for enterprises behind AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle, respectively.