Veeam launches solution for virtualization management

Server virtualization has become a must-have technology for almost any organization. While VMware vSphere still dominates the market with its mature and feature-rich platform, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat KVM have gotten much closer to feature parity with VMware. As a result, the virtualization platform wars are now being focused on the next frontier of server virtualization: the management war.

The three dominant server virtualization platform providers each have their own management solution: VMware vCenter, Microsoft System Center, and Citrix XenCenter. VMware dominates the virtualization management market, in large part because it currently owns the lion’s share of the platform market. VMware administrators are also in a bit of a love fest with vCenter, refusing to give it up. But vCenter currently only supports VMware vSphere environments, which becomes a problem if a VMware-dedicated shop wants to become a heterogeneous virtual data center.

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Once you begin using multiple virtualization platforms in the same environment, the management complexity can become a nightmare, which leads to the management stack becoming the next battleground in the virtualization war. But the platform vendors are not alone here; third-party software management companies are also suiting up for the fight.

Just last week we took a look at a company called HotLink who introduced a new version of its SuperVisor product to provide centralized management of multiple virtualization platforms. Instead of using more than one management tool or overlays that try to glue different consoles together, HotLink makes one console do the work of all the others. This edition of SuperVisor snaps into VMware vCenter, allowing virtual administrators to manage Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Red Hat KVM virtual machines directly from within the VMware vCenter console.

This application provides a great opportunity for VMware shops who want to expand their choice of hypervisor platform to include something other than vSphere but still manage everything from a single console — in this case, the one that they’ve been trained on, know and love: VMware vCenter.

But what happens when you’re a Microsoft shop and you’ve been trained to use Microsoft System Center to manage your entire data center of physical servers? And what if you’ve been using it to also manage your Hyper-V environment, but now want to expand your data center to include VMware vSphere for some of the more mission-critical applications that you weren’t previously comfortable with virtualizing?

Last week, while at the Microsoft Management Summit 2012 conference, Veeam announced a new solution that might be the answer for such a situation. Perhaps best known for its virtualization backup and replication management solutions, Veeam has been slowly introducing its previously VMware-centric product lines to include support for other hypervisor platforms such as Microsoft Hyper-V. Continuing on that course, the company has launched the Veeam Management Pack (MP) 10-Pack, a free Microsoft System Center 2012 monitoring solution for VMware environments that lets System Center users monitor VMware environments from within System Center’s Operations Manager console.

While it’s true that Microsoft System Center 2012 can already manage VMware on its own, it’s fairly limited in what it can do and only provides basic monitoring functionality for vSphere. That’s more than what VMware vCenter provides out-of-the-box for Hyper-V users, but it still isn’t enough to keep organizations from having to invest in and use multiple management tools. Veeam is ready to double down on the idea that Microsoft is going to continue to gain traction with its hypervisor technology, and the company believes that users will demand a single management application to control their physical environments as well as their VMware and Hyper-V mixed-mode virtual data centers.

Beyond the simple functionality that System Center already provides, Veeam’s MP adds alerts, diagrams, dashboards, reporting, auditing, notifications, responses, and automation for all VMware components, including vCenter Server, clusters, hosts, virtual machines, storage, and hardware. It can also provide a detailed health model with hundreds of metrics and events, including advanced metrics such as memory pressure, disk pressure, and disk IOPS that are unique to Veeam MP.

“Many of our customers rely on System Center and can be assured they have the best combination of technology to monitor, manage, and protect their IT environments that work seamlessly with System Center 2012,” said Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO of Veeam Software. “By offering the Veeam Management Pack 10-Pack, customers will be able to realize the benefits of Veeam and Microsoft technology working together.”

The free Veeam Management Pack 10-Pack is a fully functioning version of the MP and comes with a full year of maintenance and support. However, there are a few caveats to keep in mind. In order to qualify for this offer, you must be new to the Veeam MP and have System Center 2012 or plans to deploy it soon. In addition, the free license only supports up to 10 sockets.

What does that mean? Licensing for 10 sockets could translate to supporting five VMware host servers (such as dual socket/quad core hosts); with an average consolidation ratio of say 10:1 (VMs to host), that would mean Veeam MP would support around 50 VMware VMs. If you are a Microsoft Hyper-V shop and plan to only virtualize your mission-critical applications with VMware vSphere, a 10-socket license may be sufficient. However, if your VMware virtual machine requirements increase over time, you may need to purchase additional MP licenses for System Center.

Is a 10-socket license enough to get you hooked into System Center 2012?

This article, “Veeam launches solution for virtualization management,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.