Veeam, SolarWinds add Hyper-V support to virtualization management

Microsoft Hyper-V has slowly but surely expanded its footprint into the small to medium-sized server virtualization market. To date, its No. 1 competitor, VMware, hasn’t focused much attention on this slice of the virtualization pie, instead concentrating its efforts on larger enterprise organizations. This has created an inroad for Microsoft, giving Redmond an opportunity to advance its platform feature set while expanding within a target audience where price, more often than not, outshines additional capabilities.

But with such a small sliver of the server virtualization market share, Microsoft has not had the luxury of a deep, rich virtualization partner ecosystem like VMware, and the Redmond giant has been forced to go at virtual management alone. Unfortunately, within the small-business market, products like Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) don’t fit the bill.

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In many cases, the System Center 2012 suite has too steep a learning curve and comes across as too complex, giving the impression it was designed with a large enterprise shop in mind as opposed to a small to medium-sized business. That’s a hard pill to swallow, considering Microsoft Hyper-V is geared toward the small-business market right now as opposed to the enterprise where VMware currently dominates. Beyond that, System Center is too expensive for most small businesses.

To answer that call, two third-party virtualization management vendors who’ve long been a part of the VMware partner ecosystem both announced plans to add support for Microsoft Hyper-V to their respective management technologies. Veeam Software and SolarWinds will join another well-known virtualization third-party software vendor, VKernel, on a quest to expand virtual management software beyond the confines of VMware and into a heterogeneous environment that includes Microsoft’s latest hypervisor technology, Hyper-V.

Veeam Software

Veeam Software, a community fan favorite, is perhaps best known for its data protection and disaster recovery software, Veeam Backup & Replication. However, it’s also making a name for itself as a virtualization monitoring and reporting management provider for virtual data center environments. As part of that growing market, Veeam said it will release an update to the company’s management suite, Veeam One, which will include support for Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as other as-yet unnamed new features to enhance the product’s ease-of-use and offer even more powerful virtualization management capabilities.

With support for Hyper-V, Veeam One will be up to speed with Veeam’s Backup & Replication product, which added that feature last May. At that time, Doug Hazelman, senior director of product strategy at Veeam, told InfoWorld, “Hyper-V is pretty clearly the second most popular hypervisor on the market, and since it’s a free product its market share is likely to continue growing.” He went on to say that Hyper-V is the hypervisor his customers ask about most frequently, which explains the company’s recent engineering push behind the virtualization platform.

Ideal for small businesses with budget and staff constraints, Veeam One addresses virtualization challenges with efficient allocation of resources, documentation of the virtual infrastructure, and management reporting for performance, utilization, and workload. According to the company, unlike other products that monitor only a few performance metrics in Hyper-V environments, Veeam One will monitor more than 60 different metrics. It will also offer granular alarms that pinpoint the virtual machine on which an alert is occurring and include integrated monitoring of Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs).

Veeam One combines three previously separate products — Veeam Reporter, Monitor, and Business View — into a single SKU. With Hyper-V support, it will give customers a single management pane for a heterogeneous virtual data center made up of the two leading hypervisor technologies.

“Veeam One has always filled an attractive niche in the virtualization management space: low-cost monitoring and reporting for SMB VMware shops that can’t afford or choose not to buy higher-order management components from the vCenter stack,” said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst, Infrastructure & Operations at Forrester Research. “Now that Hyper-V is showing good uptake among SMB shops (especially with all-Microsoft shops new to virtualization), offering the same entry-level monitoring, reporting, and basic configuration tracking for Hyper-V makes good sense for Veeam.”

Bartoletti told InfoWorld that the team at Veeam has always had a sharp eye for underserved segments in the virtualization space. He added, “They’ve also led the market in simple, easy-to-use data protection tools for admins who are new to virtualization, or who don’t have huge budgets or time to reconfigure larger backup/recovery packages for the unique needs of virtual machines.”

He admits that Veeam will face competition from Microsoft System Center Essentials, Microsoft’s scaled-down small-business version of the product, but said that competition from the hypervisor vendors hasn’t stopped Veeam before.

SolarWinds

After acquiring Hyper9 over a year ago, SolarWinds has been hard at work digging deeper into the virtualization management market. The company’s unique software sales methodology and low price point have allowed SolarWinds to expand its own footprint within the virtualization market and make a name for itself within the small-business world. To gain more market share with its small-business end-users, the company is finalizing the release of Virtualization Manager 5.0, which adds support for Microsoft Hyper-V. The new management platform has already entered the beta phase, and the company plans to release the GA version next quarter.

Jon Reeve, senior director of product management at SolarWinds, said his company has noticed an increase of two or more hypervisors being used by some of its customers; having a unified and vendor-independent way of looking at the virtual infrastructure is becoming very important.

Reeve also said SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 5.0 will add discovery of Hyper-V hosts, performance monitoring, and many other features currently offered to VMware environments. Beyond that, the company looks to further expose the tight linkage between virtualization and the shared storage back end.

“There is a clear need to understand the virtualization layer and its dependence on the physical (and logical) storage underneath,” stated Reeve. “With that in mind, we are working on linkages between Virtualization Manager and Storage Manager so that users can seamlessly navigate from the virtual to the underlying physical entities.”

With a lack of resources and manpower, the small-business market may find this exposure and linking of information between storage and virtualization management to be exactly what it needs across its heterogeneous environments.

Cool technology is one thing, but at the end of the day, Veeam and SolarWinds are out to make money, so it’s very telling to see what hypervisor platform these two companies have decided to support beyond VMware vSphere. As more third-party software vendors climb onboard the Microsoft train, it will become that much easier for end-users to choose a heterogeneous virtual infrastructure.

Two years ago, Xen was the alternative platform that people were talking about, and vendors were contemplating how to add support to their already created VMware products. But with the advancements that Microsoft has been making with Hyper-V, the Redmond giant has all but put Xen in the rearview mirror, allowing them to grow their supported ecosystem base.

This article, “Veeam, SolarWinds add Hyper-V support to virtualization management,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.