Veeam Software, an innovative provider of backup, replication and virtualisation management solutions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, has announced Veeam Management Pack (MP) v6.5 for VMware.
Veeam MP extends deep VMware monitoring, management and capacity planning to Microsoft System Center, providing complete visibility of physical and virtual infrastructures and applications, all from one console. With Veeam MP, IT can leverage its existing investment in Microsoft System Center to manage the vSphere environment from a management platform they already use and know well.
“We’ve spent the last seven years developing management and data protection solutions for the modern data centre,” says Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Veeam.
“More than 2 500 enterprise customers licensing more than 100 000 sockets depend on the Veeam MP to manage vSphere with Microsoft System Center, a management framework they already know and trust. And now that Veeam MP integrates with the number one data protection solution for virtualisation, Veeam Backup & Replication, customers can use that same console to manage their backup infrastructure.”
The new version of the Veeam MP includes enhanced fault tolerance that eliminates single point of failure for monitoring. If vCenter goes down, Veeam MP v6.5 automatically fails over and reconfigures so that data will be collected directly from vSphere hosts.
When vCenter is restored, Veeam MP returns to the default data collection method without interruption. Enterprise IT need never worry that a failure in their virtual environment will cause monitoring failure.
“In the world of VMware monitoring, the name Veeam has become synonymous with quality,” says Pete Zerger, managing principal consultant with Infront Consulting Group.
“When we talk to customers about monitoring VMware with System Centre 2012, there is Veeam and then there’s everyone else.”
In addition, Veeam MP 6.5 integrates with Veeam Backup & Replication so that IT can manage the backup infrastructure directly from Microsoft System Center, further unifying data centre management in a single console.
After Veeam MP discovers the Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure, it can monitor a wide array of items including free disk space on proxy repositories, availability of WAN accelerators and backup proxies, and verification of virtual machine (VM) restorability.
It can also monitor the status of backup jobs running on backup servers, including performance metrics for backup jobs, with alerts for failure and duration and much more.
Veeam MP v6.5 also provides new configuration tracking and alert correlation for all vSphere objects to show IT exactly what has changed within the vSphere environment. If a potential problem arises around resources or capacity, IT will have a graphical correlation of events to help pinpoint the cause.
“Once in a while you work on something which is so cool that you have to share it. For me, that’s Veeam MP,” says Cameron Fuller, Corporate Practice Lead for System Center for Catapult Systems (a Veeam Gold ProPartner), and co-author of numerous books on Microsoft System Center in the Unleashed series.
“The undersized and oversized reports in the Veeam MP are especially useful. By changing our allocation of resources, we were able to free up capacity and increase performance for systems which were under-resourced.”
“Heterogeneous environments are a fact of IT life, and Microsoft is committed to helping customers manage mixed infrastructure with System Center 2012 R2,” says Brian Hillger, director, Product Marketing, at Microsoft. “Veeam MP extends the power of Microsoft System Center to give enterprise IT additional visibility into vSphere environments.”