Azure Connect for Windows Azure Pack is now generally available along with several other additions to VMware vCenter integration as part of the VConnect v1.8.1 January 2016 release update.
Azure Connect enables management of Azure virtual machines within Windows Azure Pack. Combined with Azure Resource Management extension, users and administrators get visibility to all Azure resources from Windows Azure Pack. These new additions combined with WAP and VConnect now enables enterprises and service providers to offer hybrid cloud offerings with ability to manage and provision Virtual Machines across VMware vCenter, System Center Hyper-V (with native WAP support) as well as the public cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure.
Key features and scenarios enabled by Azure Connect and VConnect Platform:
Tenant Scenarios
Create new Azure VMs
Delete existing Azure VMs
Connect to Azure VMs using RDP
Manage VMs in Azure, such as Power operations, creating snapshots, configuring CPU/ memory
Admin Scenarios
Enable DevOps and Production deployments to Azure with centralized access control
Restrict quotas like number of VMs and cores
Track Azure VM usage for billing purposes
Control and Customize VM provisioning at three levels – VM Templates, Operations Templates, and ARM Templates
Resource Management using ARM
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to deploy VMs to Azure public cloud
RBAC for Tenants to provision and manage resources in Azure, with individual Resource Groups per WAP Subscription
Optional ARM extension for management of Azure resources linked to the VMs
Customize and Extend Azure VM Provisioning
Use Operations Templates to customize provisioning and de-provisioning flow
Add custom or legacy deployment steps, such as, creating an entry in CMDB, Send an email etc.
Invoke Runbooks, 3rd party services, or tools
Leverage Custom Command extensions to automate all and any support tasks
Custom Commands Library
Out-of-the-box Custom Commands to Add Disk, Expand Disk and Delete Disk
Import or export custom commands as .zip archives from or to a local file share
Import Custom Commands from a central library hosted in GitHub
Azure Resource Management Tenant Extension
List ALL Azure public cloud resources for the given WAP User
Simple Management Operations inline
Fully functional free trial for Windows Azure Pack.
Install today to see the benefits and ROI by providing unified provisioning, management and enterprise automation experience for Microsoft Azure and VMWare platforms.
Deploy Virtual Machines (IaaS) to Microsoft Azure or VMWare vCenter - with choise of abstracting the underlying platform to your end users.
“The Cloud Assert team has been fantastic to work with.
Highly effective at communication, understanding our needs, very impressive initiative and efficiency. Expressing our deadline to meet our requirements to go live, the Cloud Assert team provided us immediate results, all the while working with us on any and all customization we requested to bring the product in our environment to its full potential.
- Fortune 100 Customer
For the enterprises, choosing a hybrid cloud platform is a hard proposition. Microsoft addressed it with Azure Stack (an extension of Microsoft’s Azure cloud)