What's new in vCloud Automation Center 6.0

On December 10, 2013 VMware announced vCloud Automation Center 6.0, the latest release of vCloud Automation. This release includes some nice improvements. This is from the what's new white paper.

Unified Service Catalog for Infrastructure, Desktop, and Application Services – 

• vCloud now offers a single catalog for publishing and consuming application services. Users can browse the same catalog to request and provision single or multi-node applications.
• Catalog requests are now governed by a more flexible and powerful policy engine. Approval polices can be based on request criteria, support multiple levels of approvers and be enforced both before and after services are provisioned.

Enhancements to Application Deployment and Updates (formerly "Application Director") – 

• Users can request applications from the Service Catalog and monitor their overall deployment status.
• Application enhancements: Users can now roll back failed updates to restore the system. They can also significantly reduce the time to update an application by reusing update profiles that store frequently used update scripts and properties. This enables the promotion of changes across Deployment Environments to facilitate Release Automation, and scale-in of clustered applications to save unused resources.
• External services: Users can reduce time to deliver workload by connecting to an external or existing service such as a load balancer, an existing database with pre-configured schema, SaaS applications such as Salesforce, an LDAP server, an SSO server and so on.
• Policy-based provisioning: Administrators can enforce policies across different deployment environments by blacklisting application services or enforcing mandatory services. They can also facilitate policy-based provisioning by setting number of Total Instances (VMs) limits across all nodes in a deployment. Compliance View shows policy violations against currently active and effective policies on deployments and application updates.
• Puppet integration: In this release, support for reuse of Puppet content to build application blueprints in Application Director allows application architects to accomplish the following goals:
  • Model multi-tier applications using Puppet modules.
  • Mix-and-match Puppet and non-Puppet content in application blueprints.
  • Import both Puppet Open Source and Puppet Enterprise Modules
  • Manage the application update life cycle while maintaining multi-node dependencies, property bindings, and diverse content types.
  • Leverage vCloud Automation Center Service Catalog to publish and request Puppet applications.

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