VMware has this month begun a new strategy designed to simplify and automate how developers should manage services in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. VMware vCenter Operations aims to replace traditional management tools and processes, which were designed to handle discrete processes across static computing stacks and cannot keep pace with the velocity of new virtual environments.
Gartner analyst Cameron Haight suggests that decades of investment in complex infrastructures, processes and management tools have contributed to high IT operations and service delivery costs. He further comments that there is an opportunity to improve IT efficiency and agility in cloud environments. "But to do this, we need to completely reassess the conventional wisdom of the role of management in relation to the build-out of these emerging cloud environments," he said.
As vmWare's newest enterprise management product, the company says that vCenter Operations will be tightly integrated with VMware vSphere, will understand its advanced infrastructure management functionality and be able to collect data from its underlying physical components (servers, storage, network) as well as other management tools within the enterprise. It will then analyze the millions of data points these systems produce in real-time to get to the information that matters and visually present it in a simple, actionable way through dashboards.
This new offering aims to give infrastructure and operations teams intelligence to make informed operational decisions in order to proactively ensure service levels in dynamic cloud environments with real-time performance dashboards. The product also seeks to optimize deployments in “real-time” to enable self-service provisioning with real-time analysis of performance and capacity to help teams make informed decisions on deployment options. Further to this, vCenter Operations provides automated provisioning and configuration analysis for maintaining continuous compliance with operational best practices and industry (or regulatory) compliance requirements.
"To us, cloud computing means dynamic resources that are self-provisioning and VMware vCenter Operations is purpose-built to support this type of environment," said Brian Alexander, systems architect, information technology, Mentor Graphics Corporation. "Two things set VMware vCenter Operations apart: the hooks into VMware vSphere that give it broad understanding of the system — storage, network, VM performance — and the analytics that will transform the data it gleans into actionable information."
