What is VMware Skyline?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could proactively analyse problems in your environment that focus on your entire VMware solution, rather than focussing on just one issue for one VMware technology?

VMware Skyline can do just that! Announced at VMworld Vegas 2017, it is a new proactive support technology that will collect product telemetry information, to better the support experience across all VMware products.

Skyline is a standalone virtual appliance that you deploy to your datacenter environment, requiring just 2 vCPU, 8GB RAM and 82GB storage.  Skyline automatically collects VMware product configuration, feature and performance data, which is encrypted and streamed to VMware to be analysed by a machine learning engine, comparing the data against an expanding library of support and product intelligence.  Other than installation, there is almost no admin overhead for the customer.  The result is a Proactive Operational Summary Report that will help you to improve the overall stability and reliability of your environment, currently bi-weekly for Premier Support (Mission Critical, Healthcare Critical and Business Critical).

Increasingly customers are ceasing to roll out individual technologies, and instead are rolling out the whole Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) or End User Compute (EUC) stack, making pro-active monitoring increasingly difficult.  Skyline can spot configuration issues within your environment before they become an issue, reducing downtime and time to resolution by focussing on problems and not symptoms, which ultimately helps you achieve the maximum value from your VMware solutions.

Skyline can ensure you are staying within the guidelines of the VMware Validated Designs (VVD), perform health checks and issue detection, transitioning you from a reactive break fix support model to a proactive and predictive support model.

You would imagine such a product would cost a pretty penny, but it is available at no additional cost or SKU!  It is part of your support level offering, which customers just needing to be current on their Support and Subscription Services (SnS).

Aligned to VMware Global Support Services (GSS) offerings, VMware Skyline is initially available for Premier Support customers in North America. Today VMware Skyline provides increased visibility for VMware vSphere (5.5+), vSAN (6.6+) and VMware NSX (6.0+) environments, with additional products being added over time.  Access for EMEA Premier Support customers will begin later this year, with APAC customers following in 2019.

You can read more on the VMware Support Offerings webpage here.VMware Skyline is subject to the VMware End User License Agreement; Read more here.

To get started with Skyline you can sign up for the Managed Access program at the bottom of the page or here, or if you have one, contact your VMWare TAM who can assist you.

You can also watch VMware’s Download, Installation & Configuration below.