Whats New in Cisco CloudCenter (guess what feature they have dropped..?)

Our CMP consultant, Ronald van Vugt has just published an updated evaluation of the latest release of Cisco CloudCenter (ver 4.8). Head over to the comparison to check out his evaluation of its capabilities which highlights its latest improvements in VM orchestration and management.

You can quickly scan for fundamentally new capabilities by looking out the the

icon in the evaluation (which Ronald has helpfully added).

One thing which is a “new” direction for Cisco is the lack of support of VMware NSX as a virtual network overlay. Ronald is still rating CloudCenter as “green” on SDN based on our criteria, however it is worth highlighting that Cisco has taken the decision to not support NSX in version 4.8. Ronald has highlighted this is in the info details (in the comparison click on this icon

for added information).

What’s New in 4.8?

CloudCenter jumped up by 10 points in our evaluation with v 4.8 due a wide array of enhancements. It offers new features that broaden the scope of workloads that can be managed by CloudCenter, and extend what users can do via self-service, improving both user self-service capabilities and central IT control.
New features include:

– “Brownfield” Import of VMs: Import and manage previously deployed workloads along with new CloudCenter deployed workloads, in both data center and cloud. (“”Brownfield typically refers to hosts that have existing virtual machines running – contrasting with “greenfield” installation when you use hosts with freshly installed hypervisor/new vms)

– VM or Application View: Flip between VM view and application view, for those that prefer to manage workloads at the VM level.

– Action Library: Define and execute self-service post-deployment management actions further enable self-service within guardrails and that reduce the need for IT help tickets.

– New Cloud Type – Alibaba Cloud support, across all regions, VMware vCenter 6.5 added (all in addition to existing support for SoftLayer, Google Cloud, Azure, AWS)

– Native Language Support – Chinese, Japanese, and French.

– Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) – Offer to fit with the “fee for service” service providers.

– Cisco Ecosystem Benefits – The combination of VM import and action library offers improved interaction with Cisco Tetration, UCS Director, and AppDynamics.

There is much more – For further details see this article or the official 4.8 release notes here.

As always we welcome any feedback on our evaluations from the extended community – so feel free to contact WhatMatrix/Ronald with any comments (simply click on any feature to submit direct feedback as shown).