I first ran across Iwan Rahabok, the author of this book, in late 2013 when my company, Blue Medora, began shipping our first software solutions that were built on top of vRealize Operations. By that point, Iwan had established himself as one of the top 2–3 authorities on the planet on vRealize Operations; its capabilities were that it was strong, but still immature, and the key role the product had been playing in the Cloud Systems Management journey early adopters of the product were embarking on. Blue Medora's first encounter with Iwan was via a series on VMware internal training classes that Iwan had developed based on his early experiences with the product, with an emphasis on how it optimizes its configuration to solve real-world customer challenges. In short, in those early days of vRealize Operations, Iwan was playing an integral role in educating others in VMware on the product, its capabilities, and how to relate that to real-world customer environments.

vRealize Operations has become the foundational component of, according to IDC, the #1 Cloud Systems Management platform, considering market share available today. Over the past 2 years, VMware has continued to invest heavily in expanding vRealize Operations, both in terms of scalability, usability, and consumability as well as adding or deeply enhancing core features, including anomaly detection, predictive analytics, capacity planning, right-sizing, and workload placement. These new capabilities have been rolled out of a short 15-month time period via 3 significant updates: version 6.0 in December 2014, version 6.1 in August 2015, and version 6.2 in January 2016. VMware has successfully evolved vRealize Operations from a vSphere-centric tool to a broad-based SDDC management tool perfectly suited to monitoring and managing mixed-hypervisor environments, compute, storage, network, converged, infrastructure, as well as Tier-1 business critical applications.

Given those changes, Iwan rightly decided that in order to keep this book relevant and up to date with the incredible pace of change within the vRealize Operations platform since this book's first publication, which he needed to go back and rewrite it from the ground up. This edition is the labor of those efforts.

This book is required by all vRealize Operations admins and users—whether you are a first-time user of vRealize Operations or a seasoned professional, managing large-scale hybrid enterprise environments. Iwan is one of the most recognized vRealize Operations experts in the world, and the content of this book belies his deep personal experience with the product as well as Iwan's ongoing interactions with VMware staff, partners, and customers who are architecting configuring, installing, and using the product.

Nathan Owen

CEO, Blue Medora