Veeam Management Pack for System Center 2012

Veeam Software announced the availability of Veeam Management Pack (MP) v6 for VMware, which gives large to mid-sized IT organizations that use Microsoft System Center additional powerful forecasting and planning capabilities to better manage VMware environments.

Veeam MP extends System Center with deep VMware monitoring, management and capacity planning and provides a unified view from a single console of both physical and virtual infrastructures and applications.

Specifically, Veeam MP
extends Microsoft System Center to:

• Gain deep visibility into the VMware infrastructure, including VMs, vSphere and the resources on which they run;
• Plan effectively for future capacity needs;
• Solve problems faster to meet service level requirements; and
• Achieve continuous improvement in datacenter efficiency.

This new release of Veeam MP includes new capacity planning reports for VMware on host failure modeling, performance forecasts for datastores, performance forecasts for vSphere clusters, and VM capacity prediction. These reports bring potential capacity issues to IT’s attention long before they cause problems. They also include powerful, what-if modeling to help IT see how specific changes to their virtual infrastructure will affect performance.

With Veeam MP v6, IT can answer questions like, "What would happen to performance if this host failed?" and "How many days do I have before this VM runs out of storage?"

Veeam MP v6 also includes:

• New Topology Views for Storage, Network and Compute: In the storage and network topologies, Veeam MP maps VMs to the storage and software-defined network components they are using, respectively. In the compute topology, IT can view hosts, their physical hardware, the logical hypervisor components and the VMs they are running.
• 30 New System Center 2012 Dashboards: These take advantage of the new System Center 2012 Operations Manager dashboard widgets to show real-time views of critical vSphere systems. Dashboards include, "Top 10 hosts for CPU per cluster" and "Top 10 VMs for I/O per datastore."
• New vSphere Analysis Reports: Veeam MP’s easy-to-use reports on common issues within the vSphere infrastructure now include: Datastore Space and Performance Usage Heatmaps: Color codes show VM space usage and growth per datastore in one report, and VM IO/s and latency per datastore in another; VM uptime: Tracks VM availability to ensure it meets service level objectives; Top Troublemakers: Lists the noisiest, alert-generating vSphere objects in the environment; Oversized and Undersized VMs: Provides guidance to right-size VM resources for a more efficient datacenter; and Zombie VMs: Identifies idle and powered-off VMs that are wasting resources.
• Performance Analysis and Correlation Monitors: These new monitor types provide dynamic correlated data right in the alert description. Unlike other VMware monitoring solutions, these monitors accept multiple performance metric inputs and gather correlated data from other vSphere objects to help solve problems faster. For example, a host CPU usage alert could provide information about the Top five VMs that are causing high CPU on a given host.

Veeam MP v6 supports Windows Server 2012, Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1, and vSphere 5.1. It is Windows Server 2012 certified.

Veeam is the 2012 Microsoft Management and Virtualization Partner of the Year.

Veeam MP was selected as the VirtualizationAdmin.com Readers’ Choice Award Winner for Monitoring Management & Performance.

Brian Hillger, director, server and tools marketing, Microsoft Corp., said: "In line with Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability, Veeam MP extends the power of Microsoft System Center to give enterprise IT deep visibility into vSphere environments. System Center provides a single console from which IT can manage both physical and virtual infrastructures, even in heterogeneous environments. With its focus on extending System Center, Veeam is the 2012 Microsoft Management and Virtualization Partner of the Year for good reason."

Derek Hennessy, senior consultant, BEarena Pty Ltd., said: "Veeam MP provides us with a complete view of our environment in a single pane of glass. The new features within Veeam MP v6 allow us to find the root cause of issues even faster than before, which reduces our time to resolution. The new Capacity Planning feature allows our operators to be more pro-active and efficient at problem resolution. The visibility of both the physical and virtual components in once place gives us a holistic overview of our environment. Without doubt the Veeam MP is the best monitoring tool for VMware virtual environments on the market and has helped us to grow our business to new heights. Once again Veeam is ahead of the curve."

Jason Buffington, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "Veeam has long been known as an early innovator in solving VMware-specific backup challenges, and has since brought that know-how to Hyper-V customers. Now Veeam is bringing that insight to VMware monitoring scenarios. There is a huge base of Windows servers that are managed by Microsoft System Center, but are virtualized on top of VMware hypervisors. System Center provides a breadth of monitoring and management capabilities for Windows environments, but it needs better visibility into vSphere instrumentation to truly fully realize Microsoft’s private cloud management vision. Veeam MP v6 looks to fill that gap, which should delight System Center administrators and partners."

Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO, Veeam Software, said: "Virtualization is now the dominant environment within the modern data center, so managing it effectively has become absolutely vital to the health of the enterprise. With the Veeam MP v6, organizations can take control of their virtual VMware environment using a management framework they already know very well: Microsoft System Center."

Free Offer for New Veeam MP Customers
Ten free sockets and one full year of maintenance are available for free exclusively to new Veeam MP users worldwide who have or plan to deploy Microsoft System Center. The license is perpetual and contains full functionality.

Veeam Management Pack v6 is available.