Veeam Gives System Center Better View Of VMware Environments

Virtualization vendor Veeam on Thursday updated its software for monitoring and managing VMware infrastructure through Microsoft System Center 2012.

Veeam's Management Pack for VMware, now in version 6, comes with expanded capacity planning reporting that lets users simulate troublesome scenarios to test the resiliency of their VMware software setup.

For example, an organization with ESX hosts running in a cluster could see what would happen if one of the hosts failed, in terms of the impact on CPU and memory. It could also determine if the remaining hosts would be able to pick up the slack, and if so, how long they'd be able to do so before running out of storage.

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This beefed-up reporting is important because VMware virtual infrastructure has essentially been a black box, with no information on hosts and clusters, Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy, said in an interview with CRN.

"We saw a need to bring VMware data into the operational platform," Hazelman told CRN.

A big part of the value companies like Veeam provide lies in doing things that Microsoft, VMware and other virtualization players haven’t yet got around to building. One example is topology maps, which in version six are expanded to include mapping of virtual machines their associated storage, network and compute components.

Veeam's Management Pack version 6 also comes with more than 30 dashboard views that tie into Microsoft's updated System Center 2012 Operations Manager dashboard "widgets," which are used for providing a real-time view of vSphere performance, according to Hazelman.

Veeam's Management Pack version 6 supports Microsoft Windows Server 2012, Microsoft System Center 2012 service pack 1, and VMware vSphere 5.1. It's priced at $450 per server socket.

Founded in 2006, Veeam includes several executives from Aelita Software, a company that focused on Windows Server management solutions before being acquired by Quest Software in 2004.

PUBLISHED APRIL 4, 2013