VMware Centralizes VM, Cloud Controls

VMware already supplies the world's most popular virtualization layer for IT systems. Now the company wants to become your handy-dandy cloud computing operations provider.

VMware on March 9 launched a new platform, VMware vCenter Operations, which centralizes and automates administrative control of dynamic virtual and cloud environments. The new package provides visibility throughout a private or hybrid cloud system in addition to analytics/reporting on the data that flows through it.

The new control platform, as one might imagine, is tightly integrated with VMware vSphere, VMware Vice President of Enterprise Management Product Strategy Ramin Sayar told eWEEK.

"vCenter Operations understands advanced infrastructure management functionality and collects data from its underlying physical components (servers, storage, network) as well as other management tools within the enterprise," Sayar said.

"It will analyze 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 means infrastructure and operations teams will have the facts they need to make fast, informed operational decisions."

Armed with real-time, Web-based performance dashboards, infrastructure and operations teams will have the facts they need to ensure that adequate service levels are kept in dynamic cloud environments; get to the root cause of performance problems faster; optimize real-time deployments for self-service provisioning; and maintain compliance obligations, Sayar said.

"vCenter Operations offers a single source to continually scan scale-out infrastructure resources across the data center, collect and analyze system performance information, and amalgamate those findings in easy-to-understand and use dashboards," analyst Charles King of Pund-IT wrote in an advisory.

"At one level, this qualifies as a no-brainer in terms of the quantifiable value that it should provide VMware's myriad enterprise customers. But the opportunity to develop such a solution arises, at least in part, from the understandable reluctance scale-out vendors feel about collaborating too closely with competitors."

As a result, VMware can step into the fray as an interested third party/partner with the experience and smarts to craft a solution agreeable and beneficial for all, King wrote.

"That is a familiar position for the company, whose other highly robust and flexible cross-datacenter solutions, including vCenter and vCloud, have done much to champion VMware's vision of and approach to the cloud -- and to keep the company firmly in its position at the head of the x86 virtualization class," King wrote.

vCenter Operations will become available in late March 2011 in three editions, with the first versions priced at $50 per VM,  Sayar said.