The battle between VMware and traditional vendors in data center management

With vcenter Operations Suite 5,vmware, a solid step is taken to manage the emerging virtual machine environment in a more advanced way than traditional management tool vendors.

VMware recently released vcenter Operations Management Suite 5, the second version of its virtual environment system management product, which enhances the ability to render virtualized environments through dashboards. This is only the second major release of VMware's products in March 2011, but its version number is consistent with VMware's flagship product line vsphere 5.

Vcenter Operations integrates several system management functions into a single product, such as configuration management, performance management, and capacity management. In VMware's view, these features that used to be considered different tasks in the data center have been merged in the virtualized environment.

The Vcenter Operations Management suite was added to the VMware product family in 2011, which is one of the reasons for the continued growth in revenue, although the virtualization software market is maturing. VMware's revenue grew by 32% in 2011, and net income doubled from the previous year to $724 million trillion.

Traditional system management tools vendors, including CAs and BMC software companies, are racing to provide systems management tools for future enterprise data centers, but VMware puts virtualization at the heart of its business strategy and wants to build a fully virtualized environment through the Vcenter Management console: including servers, Storage systems and networks.

This is not the way most people use it today, and many data center managers will be content to manage virtual machines with tools provided by traditional system management tools vendors, a method that does not require them to change the overall management approach or system.

But facing this version of Vcenter Operations,vmware that the virtualization resource pool allows you to manage in different ways. In the first release, vcenter Operations provides a view of the overall vsphere environment. In version 5, this view extends to a single virtual machine itself.

At the end of the day, the IT department can consolidate the operating system, transfer the virtual machines to the server, and the capacity freed up on the server can handle the virtual machines rather than keeping many devices running. To achieve such resource savings, the storage and security settings associated with each virtual machine need to migrate with the virtual machine. VMware says it provides the means to achieve this task through vcenter operations and vsphere.

There are other aspects that are much different from existing systems management methods. For example, vcenter Operations version 5 will provide microscopic metrics (which can drill down on a virtual machine and check its health), or macro metrics (indicating the "State of the Environment"). How efficient? Where are the risk factors? If Vcenter operations detects performance degradation, it does not require manual intervention to begin to analyze the root cause of the problem.

In addition, VMware is somewhat of the view that it can lead to advanced analysis techniques to manage virtual systems to simplify operations and automate in ways that traditional vendors cannot. VMware acquired Integrion in September 2010 and has the ability to analyze operational statistics, which is the basis of the Vcenter operations alarm function. An in-depth understanding of the statistics of normal operations allows vcenter operations to filter out many minor events and false positives, thus helping operations managers focus on the real need for attention.

Microsoft, with Bae Center 2012, retorts that it is the most powerful vendor to manage virtual resources because it is already managing the physical devices on which virtual resources are based. These two manufacturers have their own advantages. VMware is primarily a professional manufacturer of virtualization software, but VMware's VP of product, Ramin Sayar, specifically points out that it can be from System Center and its virtual Machine manager if needed Component to extract the required statistics.

In turn, the Microsoft spokesperson says System Center 2012 can get all the information it needs to manage VMware's ESX server virtual machines by contacting VMware's Vcenter console.

In addition to the dashboard's macro metrics or "super metrics", VMware's senior product marketing manager Martin Klaus also lists the following new features of version 5:

Automatically discover and map the relationships and dependencies between applications and the infrastructure components that support them.

Start the smart alert instead of the alert stream, based on the analysis of events that are excluded from the normal operating parameter range.

Configuration and monitoring data are more tightly integrated with real-time performance information, so that risks and vulnerabilities can be predicted early so that they do not affect end users.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)