IT departments can manage both their on-premise and cloud applications with one single management tool, according to VMware.

The virtualisation specialist has updated its vRealise Suite to version 6.0 to help IT managers keep on top of applications running on both physical infrastructure and in private or public clouds.

The update makes vRealise Suite a cloud management platform suitable for hybrid cloud deployments, and comes at a time when IT is faced with balancing improving the speed and agility of app development with ensuring strict levels of security and compliance in taking care of their traditional on-premise infrastructure.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger (pictured) used his keynote at VMworld Europe this morning to warn that these conflicting goals have led to IT pros dividing their estate – and data – into rigidly defined areas of cloud and on-premise.

"Silos are containing IT and creating this environment where it’s one versus the other, it’s traditional apps versus new cloud data apps, its IT versus developers, it’s on or off-premise where you can choose to be safe, secure and compliant or you can be agile and scalable," he said.

"We’re in a unique position to bridge this divide and conquer the silos and break these barriers that slow down the business."

The vRealise Suite employs a shared service model that enables IT to manage both modern applications and traditional ‘three-tier’ business applications both in the cloud and on-premise.

The company cited second hand car sales site Autotrader as a customer of the suite, and its senior systems engineer, Chris Nagasaki, said in a statement: "By standardising on VMware’s cloud management platform we can now proactively manage and monitor our on-premises systems to achieve high performance, and have positioned ourselves to adopt a hybrid cloud model over time."

And Gelsinger added that the ability to manage both on and off-premise apps would satisfy customer demand for such a management tool.

"Increasingly customers say if I’m going to buy into the cloud management platform from you, it has to support [my] full range of infrastructure requirements. So it’s delivered on and off-premise. These will not just support today’s apps but also tomorrow’s application environments as well."

vRealise Operations 6.0

This management across on-premise and cloud infrastructures is supported by the addition of vRealise Operations 6.0 – an update to the Operations software that introduces predictive analytics, problem detection and automation to physical and virtual infrastructures.

Gelsinger claimed the update also expands the scalability of the environment by eight times, while it also includes new capacity pplanning and project management capabilities beyond VMware vSphere to cover physical and app-level metrics as well.

VMware believes this will lead to better demand management, as wel as helping IT keep an eye on their available resources and service level agreements.

vRealise Code Stream

VMware’s new vRealise tool, vRealise Code Stream, is targeted at IT managers struggling to support agile and DevOps processes.

The new piece of software in the suite accelerates app release cycles and improves their agility, VMware claimed, by automating the software release process and providing one dashboard for visibility into Dev and Ops teams’ release processes.

According to Gelsinger: "Many of you in IT need to enable this new model of DevOps and developer-driven operations and VRealise Code Stream enables these DevOps ernvironments to develop, automate and govern the application lifecycle and release of the applications that you’re deploying against that infrastructure. This is an exciting, new capability."

vRealise Air Compliance

Finally, VMware has released vRealise Air Compliance, which it claims is an industry-first SaaS compliance tool, in beta. This would help customers to assess their vSphere environment against security and regulatory requirements including the healthcare industry’s HIPPA and HITECH guidelines.