Veeam Software, innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Centre, announced that the new Veeam Management Pack (MP) version 7 for System Centre is now generally available.

Veeam MP v7 adds Microsoft Hyper-V support, providing full app-to-metal visibility within Microsoft System Centre for both the Hyper-V and VMware vSphere layers to proactively monitor and alert IT of issues before they affect operations. Veeam has also introduced the full-featured Enterprise Plus and the Enterprise edition to meet the different IT management needs and budgets of System Centre users.

Veeam MP v7 extends System Centre Operations Manager’s features to deliver complete visibility of virtual and physical infrastructures and their dependencies. IT managers receive the monitoring, analysis and planning tools needed to quickly resolve issues, make informed decisions and meet the 24/7 availability needs of today’s business.

New features in Veeam MP v7 include:

* Realtime Hyper-V performance metrics – gives Hyper-V administrators detailed real-time insight into what is happening in their environment. Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V displays real-time memory and CPU consumption for the host and each associated VM.

* Capacity planning for hybrid cloud – takes the time and guesswork out of planning hybrid cloud environments. Veeam MP v7 analyses on-premises virtual workloads and recommends the appropriate Microsoft Azure or VMware vCloud Hybrid Service resources so that IT can efficiently plan and budget for a hybrid cloud strategy.

* vSphere host security profile reporting – provides IT with visibility into vSphere security settings for firewalls and services including changes, when changes occurred, who changed the setting and other critical details needed to track security configuration.

* Enhanced Veeam MP deployment automation – reduces the time and effort needed to deploy Veeam MP to support the largest VMware environments by automatically deploying collection components.

“By fully integrating Microsoft Hyper-V with Veeam MP v7 we now provide the rapidly growing Hyper-V user base with the same powerful management and monitoring tools that vSphere administrators have long enjoyed,” says Ratmir Timashev, President and CEO of Veeam. “This includes complete visibility of their critical virtual systems, risk mitigation, and proactive monitoring of Hyper-V from Microsoft’s System Centre Operations Manager console.”

“We are pleased to see Veeam support System Centre with the Veeam Management Pack v7,” says Chris Van Wesep, director, Product Marketing, Cloud & Enterprise at Microsoft.
“With this latest release, Veeam Management Pack builds on Microsoft System Centre’s unified approach to management for virtual and physical infrastructure across on-premises and service provider environments.”

“Business continuity in today’s complex mix of virtual and physical resources requires solutions that understand the entire environment,” says Iain Mobberley, technical director at OCSL, a UK-based system integrator and gold Veeam Partner.

“Our customers depend on the Veeam Management Pack integrated with Microsoft System Centre for critical visibility, monitoring and analysis views to reduce IT risks and deliver on SLA commitments.”

Two licensing options are now offered with Veeam MP v7: the Enterprise Plus edition and Enterprise edition:

* The Enterprise Plus edition provides full features for strategic visibility of the app-to-metal stack and analysis tools needed for critical decision making, planning, optimization and right-sizing dynamic virtual environments. For example, IT could use Veeam MP to provide real-time forecasting analysis of a cluster’s capacity and determine the number of days until computing resources will be completely consumed, enabling administrators to react before a problem occurs. Current Veeam MP v6.5 customers with active maintenance can upgrade to Enterprise Plus edition free of charge.

* The Enterprise edition is designed to handle tactical management tasks and includes monitoring and alert management, report templates, and sophisticated dashboards, along with a subset of the management features offered in previous versions of Veeam MP.

Now through 31 December, 2014, Veeam provides up to 100 full-production licenses of Veeam MP Enterprise edition for Hyper-V, plus one year of maintenance per customer free of charge. These free licenses are eligible for upgrade to the full-featured Enterprise Plus.