Included in the management announcements made at VMworld Barcelona was the announcement of the EMC Storage Analytics Suite, which was covered in “VMware and Quest Join the Infrastructure Performance Management Party“. The product is interesting, but could this be the start of a management pack strategy for VMware vCenter Operations?
At VMworld Europe, VMware has announced significant changes to the packaging the pricing of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. The highlight is a new edition of vC OPS, Foundation, which is free with every edition of vSphere.
Quest Software has announced that they are buying VKernel. Now this is very interesting as Quest is the vendor of the market leading monitoring solution for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V (vFoglight), and VKernel is a leader in resource constraint based performance and capacity management for these two virtualization platforms. Now you ask, exactly what is the difference between monitoring vSphere (vFoglight), and doing constraint based performance and capacity management for vSphere (VKernel)?
Listening to Paul Maritz describe VMware’s vision for automated Data Center Operations at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas last month (a review of which is in this post), caused a very important issue to surface in follow up conversation with several attendees at the show. The issue is the degree to which the current organization of Data Center Operations would prevent an enterprise from being able to attain the benefits of automated IT Operations.
With VMworld 2011 around the corner whose booth’s should you visit? Well if you are an enterprise with a large scale virtualization initiative then performance and capacity management should be at or near the top of your mind. VMware clearly agrees as they have announced and delivered vCenter Operations specifically to meet this need. So after you go see vC Ops Enterprise, what else should you go see?
VMware customers who have needed to manage the Availability, Resource Utilization, Capacity, Configuration, and the impacts of these areas upon system performance have had a rich set of vendors to choose from to get these types of solutions. Up until today, a comprehensive solution in this area has not been available from VMware itself. VMware has now announced vCenter Operations, three editions of which are intended to address these issues.