VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced a strategy and a new solution to simplify and automate how IT organizations manage services in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.
VMware vCenter Operations will help customers transform IT operations to achieve the agility and economics of cloud computing.
Cloud computing represents a fundamentally different approach to IT where resources are pooled across multiple sources, provisioning and capacity are highly dynamic, and configurations are fluid. Traditional management tools and processes, which were designed to handle discrete processes across static computing stacks, cannot keep pace with the velocity of these new, intelligent virtual environments.
"For opportunistic organizations, the move to cloud computing may enable the 'breaking' of the traditional IT management model," said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner. "Decades of investment in complex infrastructures, processes and management tools have contributed to high IT operations and service delivery costs. Cloud computing, or more specifically, the cloud operating model, represents a real opportunity for enterprise IT to overcome the complexity that has been dragging down overall IT efficiency and agility. But to do this, we need to completely reassess the conventional wisdom of the role of management in relation to the build-out of these emerging cloud environments."
VMware vSphere has helped thousands of companies transform their datacenters, simplifying many core systems management functions, such as resource allocation and load balancing, by building them into the virtualization platform. VMware's management strategy is to further simplify IT by integrating performance, capacity and configuration management and applying analytics to help customers achieve the degree of automation required to operate a cloud environment.
IT management is being turned on its head as enterprises expand their virtual infrastructures to achieve improved efficiencies and responsiveness," said Ramin Sayar, vice president product strategy, enterprise management, VMware. "Increasingly, our customers are realizing that a management model designed for yesterday's IT systems is making it difficult to keep up with the demands of today's business environment. We believe that vCenter Operations will help our customers modernize their operations and take the next step in the journey towards a more simplified, agile approach to IT."
Visibility, Analytics and Actionable Intelligence Drive New IT Management Approach
vCenter Operations will be tightly integrated with VMware vSphere, understand its advanced infrastructure management functionality and able to collect data from its underlying physical components (servers, storage, network) as well as other management tools within the enterprise. It will then analyze the millions of data points these systems produce in real-time to get to the information that matters and visually present it in a simple, actionable way through dashboards. This means infrastructure and operations teams will have the intelligence they need to make fast, informed operational decisions in order to:
- Proactively ensure service levels in dynamic cloud environments - Real-time performance dashboards with patented analytics and powerful visualization of the health of the environment will allow IT to proactively pinpoint performance issues and risks before they become problems and impact SLAs.
- Get to the root cause of performance problems faster - The combination of patented analytics and infrastructure-awareness will allow vCenter Operations to more accurately and rapidly determine symptoms so that infrastructure and operations teams quickly get to the root cause of performance problems. By enabling a more collaborative approach, vCenter Operations can speed problem resolution and change management cycles and reduce manual efforts by 40%.
- Optimize deployments in real time to enable self-service provisioning - vCenter Operations will provide real-time analysis of performance and capacity to help teams make fast, informed decisions on deployment. This capability will be critical to enabling rapid and reliable provisioning needed in self-service environments.
- Maintain compliance in the face of constant change - Automated provisioning and configuration analysis will ensure optimal configuration by automatically detecting configuration changes and enabling rollback to help IT maintain continuous compliance with operational best practices and industry or regulatory compliance requirements.
"To us, cloud computing means dynamic resources that are self-provisioning, and vCenter Operations is purpose-built to support this type of environment," said Brian Alexander, systems architect, information technology, Mentor Graphics Corporation. "Two things set vCenter Operations apart: the hooks into vSphere that give it broad understanding of the system, storage, network, VM performance and the analytics that will transform the data it gleans into actionable information."
vCenter Operations Pricing and Availability
vCenter Operations is designed as a set of products and solutions that will bring together the performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities VMware has developed and acquired, including VMware vCenter Capacity IQ, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager and Integrien Alive. vCenter Operations will be available in three editions to meet the needs of customers managing both VMware vSphere-virtualized and physical environments.
- vCenter Operations Standard offers 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 performance management for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
- vCenter Operations Enterprise offers performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments and includes customizable dashboards, smart alerting and application awareness.
The first versions of these editions will be available in late Q1 with prices starting at US$50 per VM. vCenter Operations will be available through VMware sales and via VMware's more than 25,000 channel partners.