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Considering that the core products were already announced in the US edition of VMworld, one of the (obvious) announce at VMworld EU was about the management suite (and also the Horizon Suite 5.3 and NSX 1.0).

But VMware has not only announced the new versions of some management products, but also the entire cloud management vision:

cloud_management_visionVMware is going the re-define the cloud management are with three main pilars:

  • Cloud Automation
  • Cloud Operations
  • Cloud Business

To achieve this, in Q4 2013 there are several products launch:

  • Cloud Automation: vCloud Automation Center 6.0
  • Cloud Operations: VC Ops Mgmt Suite 5.8 & vCenter Log Insight 1.5
  • Cloud Business: VMware IT Business Management Suite 8.0

IT_BrokerAlso there is the idea (not so new) to transform the tradition IT in a broker of IT services to tranform it in a more agile one. But to do so there the requirement of management tools that help IT to:

  • Define what services they want to offer, at what cost, and where to source them
  • Automate service delivery across both internal and external IT services
  • Manage operational governance & control through analytics and policy automation

VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8

This suite will include some important news:

  • Enhanced monitoring of Microsoft applications (SQL and Exchange) with vCenter Operations Management Packs for MS Applications toProvide visibility to application health and it’s relation to underlying infrastructure and application components. It include also support for Microsoft Failover cluster.
  • New storage analytics capabilities to permit visibility also of physical storage infrastructure and data paths (HBA, Fabric, Arrays) and brings together Topology, Stats and Events from FC enabled HBAs, Fabric and Arrays by leveraging standardized protocols such as CIM, SMI-S and VASA (no stats in VASA 1.0).

It will also include a Unified Managed approach to monitor also:

  • Hyper-V support (leverage existing SCOM implementation or Hyperic)
  • Amazon AWS Support (includes support for EC2, Elastic Block Store, Auto Scaling Group, Elastic Load Balancing and Elastic MapReduce)

Note that the Management Pack it’s concept similar with the one used from Microsoft for its System Center Operation Manager and it’s mainly a way to define a built-in Monitoring policies for common applications that include default metrics, collection intervals, thresholds and alerts, based on research with SMEs on application specific deployment and common issues.

VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5

The Log Insight is a solution to:
  • Collect, analyze and search logs and unstructured, machine generated data
  • Optimized for VMware environments (built-in knowledge and native support for vSphere)
  • Easily extensible to physical environments, OS and applications, network and storage devices
  • Ease to use – doesn’t require learning a specialized search language
  • Simple, predictable pricing model (fixed cost per server, network or storage device)

VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0

This is probably the most interesting part, that really permit to defin an IT Broken solution (with the help of the Cloud Business part). But the list of features it’s almost too long and will be probably discuss in a future post.

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.