Veeam Releases Management Pack for Hyper-V and Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager
Veeam this week has released a new management tool to provide visibility into Hyper-V as well as VMware environments. While previous versions of the Veeam Management Pack only supported VMware, the new v7 release now provides common visibility and management of Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor. Administrators can use the Veeam Management Pack from within System Center Operations Manager.
Veeam had demonstrated a near-ready release at the TechEd conference in Houston back in May, among other System Center Operations Manager management packs. Within System Center Operations Manager, the new Veeam Management Pack version 7 for System Center offers a common dashboard that provides monitoring, capacity planning and reporting for organizations using Veeam Backup & Replication.
With the new management pack, System Center Operations Manager administrators can manage both their vSphere and Hyper-V environments together with complete visibility to physical and virtual components and their dependencies. In addition to offering deeper visibility into both hypervisors within a given infrastructure, the new Veeam Management Pack provides contextual views using color-coded heat maps for viewing various metrics and it provides real-time data feeds.
It also lets administrators manage the Veeam Backup & Replication for Hyper-V platform to determine if and when a host or virtual machine (VM) is at risk of running out of storage capacity, Doug Hazelman, the company's vice president of product strategy, said during a meeting at TechEd. "We provide views on networking, storage, heat maps -- the smart analysis monitors, as we call them," Hazelman said. "This is something you don't see in general in System Center."
If memory pressure is too high on a specific VM, the Veeam Management Pack can analyze the environment such as host metrics, the properties of the VM or whether it's configured with too little memory. Or perhaps the host has exhausted its resources. In that case a dynamic recommendation is provided. While administrators typically default to the Windows Task Manager to determine gauge utilization of CPU, memory and other common resources on a physical server, Hazelman pointed out that the common utility isn't designed to do so for VMs. The Veeam Task Manager addresses that.
The new release will be available with two licensing options. The Enterprise Plus Edition provides complete real-time forecasting, monitoring and management of the entire infrastructure including clusters and the complete virtual environment. It's available as a free update to existing Veeam Management Pack 6.5 customers.
A new lower-end Enterprise Edition is a scaled-down release that provides management and monitoring but not the full level of reporting of the Enterprise Plus version. The company is offering 100 free cores of the new Enterprise Edition free of charge, including maintenance for one year. This offer is available through the end of this year.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/25/2014 at 3:20 PM