Welcome to VMware vRealize® Automation™ documentation. Learn how you can provide a secure portal where authorized administrators, developers, or business users can request new IT services. Manage your cloud and IT resources, while ensuring compliance with business policies.

If you are looking for the documentation for the software-as-a-service cloud version of this product, see VMware vRealize® Automation Cloud™.

Get started building your provisioning infrastructure. Create VMware cloud templates for your deployable infrastructure, applications, desktops, and many others. Provide the common service catalog where requests for IT services that are processed, providing a consistent user experience despite any underlying heterogeneous infrastructure. Plan and deliver a CI/CD build and pipeline.

Learn about how to use VMware vRealize Automation SaltStack Config (formerly SaltStack Enterprise) as a configuration management system that maintains virtual machines in defined states. For example, learn how you can ensure that specific packages are installed and that specific services are running, and how you can use SaltStack Config to query and execute commands either on individual VMs or groups of VMs at high scale and speed.

Before you begin with vRealize Automation

Because of major changes between 7.x and 8.0 and later, you must pay particular attention to the version of vRealize Automation that you are running. The user experience is very different.

Here are a few ways that they are different.

Primary features 8.0 and later 7.6 and earlier
User Interface vRealize Automation Console
Initial log in page on vRealize Automation 7.6 and earlier.
Main navigation A single URL with a collection of applications that you access from a shared console. URL-driven user interface where you must know the URL to access the embedded applications.
Services From the console, you can access the new vRealize Automation services.
  • Cloud Assembly, where you add and maintain your infrastructure, create application cloud templates, and manage deployments.
  • Service Broker, where you provide the cloud templates and other templates to your consumers in a catalog. Your consumers can manage their deployments. You also create and apply policies.
  • Code Stream, where you create and manage your continuous integration and continuous delivery of software.
  • vRealize Orchestrator, where you design workflows that can turn anything into a service.
From the user interface, you add and maintain your infrastructure, create application cloud templates, define policies, and manage deployments.

This UI is where your consumers access the catalog.

vRealize Code Stream is a separate application with a separate URL.

vRealize Orchestrator is embedded in vRealize Automation. You must have the URL to access vRealize Orchestrator.

Are you ready to get started with vRealize Automation?

Choose your path.

As you use the vRealize Automation documentation, we want you to know that we value inclusion at VMware. To foster this principle within our customer, partner, and internal community, we removed non-inclusive language from our documentation.

8.0 and later 7.6

If you are running 8.0 and later, you can get started using these articles.

To use vRealize Automation in a guided training environment, enroll in the Hands-on-Lab and browse for automation labs.

If you are running 7.6 or earlier, take a look at these articles. The links are to a particular version, but you can select your version in the table of contents or on an individual article.

If you are looking for the on-premises version of Code Stream documentation that works with vRealize Automation 7.x and earlier, see vRealize Code Stream Documentation.

When you are ready, consider looking at the other VMware Cloud Management blogs.

Note: PDFs for previous releases of vRealize Automation are available for download in a ZIP archive format. The archive can be found under the Archived Documentation heading in the table of contents on the left.

Did you know that vRealize Automation is part of a suite of products?

vRealize Automation integrates with other products in the vRealize Suite.

For more information, including access to hands-on-labs, you can visit the vRealize Automation product page.