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VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Released

January 25th, 2012

VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite has been released today. This was the major announcement and focus of VMworld Europe 2011 which was billed as “The Biggest VMware Management Launch Ever”.

To recap, the new vCenter Operations Management Suite is made up of two major components:

  • vCenter Operations Manager 5.0
  • vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.0 which is a new product

The suite aspect means there is tight integration between the two components. There are workflows to analyse performance which span both components. The suite now also allows seamless upgrades between different suite editions which are Standard, Advanced and Enterprise.

  • vCenter Operations Standard: Performance management with capacity and change awareness for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
  • vCenter Operations Advanced: Adds more advanced capacity analytics and planning to vCenter Operations Standard’s performance management for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
  • vCenter Operations Enterprise: Performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments and includes customizable dashboards, smart alerting and application awareness.


So, what does vCenter Ops Suite deliver?

  • Integrated and highly automated performance, capacity and configuration management
  • Operations management console that integrates with 3rd party solutions
  • Continuous compliance analysis and remediation
  • Patented analytics that self learn “normal” in a dynamic environment

The new vCenter Operations Manager or vCOPS brings together what was in the previous vCOPS with newly integrated CapacityIQ, vCenter Chargeback Manager & vCenter Configuration Manager.

CapacityIQ: Correlate capacity, utilisation, efficiency and risk, work out your optimal utilisation, identify waste and alert on changing capacity conditions.

vCenter Chargeback Manager: Integrate cost metering and capacity analysis and report on the financial value of committed and reclaimable capacity so you can make optimisation decisions based on cost.

vCenter Configuration Manager: Correlate in-guest change events with performance and health. You can launch vCM in-context to remediate configuration changes. This means you can easily see when a performance issue arises whether it is related on something that has changed in the guest.

You can see the documentation at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vcops-pubs.html

VMware has previously said that vCenter Operations Standard will start at $50 per VM. It will be interesting to see whether the market sees the value of vCOPS enough to pay this amount per VM when there are other products with per processor licensing which could work out cheaper depending on what you actually use vCOPS for. Also vCOPS will only manage your VMware virtual environment so some customers are hesitant as they would prefer a mixed virtual, physical, multi-hypervisor solution.

The graphics look even better, the integration with the other management products is a good step forward. It will be interesting to see if VMware has released the killer shouldn’t do without VMware management suite for everyone or a luxury pricey Enterprise only product.

Here are some screenshots of the new product:

vCenter Operations Dashboard view showing new Health, Risk & Efficiency icons with far better explanations of what they mean.

1_dashboard_3

vCenter Operations Environment and details screens with the still great looking infographics.

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vCenter Operations alert details showing more Waste information and a Root Cause pane more simply layed out.

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vCenter Operations Events correlating time, resource and events from the Configuration Manager component.

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vCenter Operations Heat Map analysis.

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vCenter Operations Planning Summary and Views which tie in information from the now integrated CapacityIQ.

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vCenter Operations Reports taking information from the Chargeback Manager component.

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Moving onto the vCenter Infrastructure Navigator Summary and Inventory Navigator

V0_vin_portletV1_vin_inventory

vCenter Infrastructure Manager Application Dependency Maps

V2_vin_map

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