VMware unveils management portfolio for the cloud era

VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today unveiled three product suites designed tosimplify and automate IT management.With significant enhancements to VMware vCenter Operations and the introduction of new VMware vFabric Application Management and VMware IT Business Management suites, VMware willhelp customers amplify the value of their virtual environments and achieve the agility and economics of cloud computing. 

“As IT organizations are implementing private and hybrid clouds, traditional management approaches associated with physical distributed systems and siloed management disciplines just aren’t capable of keeping up with the pace and scale of modern IT operations,” said Boaz Chalamish, senior vice president and general manager, enterprise management at VMware.“VMware’s management solutionswill deliver a new approach that takes advantage of cloud infrastructure, is focused on eliminating IT complexity rather than orchestrating it, and will supportIT’s ability to act as a broker of services to the businesses it serves.”

VMware vSphere has helped thousands of companies transform their datacenters, simplifying many core systems management functionsby building them into the virtualization platform. VMware’s management philosophyis to continue to eliminate complexity across all areas of IT management – infrastructure, applications and the business of IT – by embedding and integrating management into its platforms, converging management disciplines to streamline processes and applying analytics to help customers achieve the degree of intelligence and automation required to deliver IT as a service.

“Capital markets customers have some of the most unique and stringent requirements for security, technology performance and platform reliability. They demand more from cloud solutions than typically offered by those outside our industry in terms of information security, managing large quantities of data, running high-performance applications and reliably connecting to their counter-parties,” said Stanley Young, CEO, NYSE Technologies. “By tapping the power of VMware's innovations in virtual infrastructure management, we were able to bring the financial industry’s first cloud computing solution specifically built for the global capital markets community to life, and at a cost well within the reach of all market participants.”

New Suites Simplify and Automate IT Management

VMware’s new management solutions will help customers transform how they manage infrastructure, applications and business services in virtual and cloud environments:

Infrastructure: The VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite

The highly dynamic nature of cloud infrastructure has outpaced traditional operations management disciplines. Introduced in March 2011, VMware vCenter Operations simplifiesand automatesoperations by integrating performance, capacity and configuration management and applying analytics to deliver the actionable intelligence customers need to proactively ensure service levels in cloud environments.

With this update, VMware will continue to deliver on itsstrategy of converging managementdisciplines with deeper integration of VMware vCenter Capacity IQ and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager. New dashboards and smart alerts will correlate performance and capacity information to identify emerging problems, help customers “right size” their infrastructure and identify and remediate performance issues caused by configuration changes. In addition, the vCenter OperationsManagement Suitewill includenew application awareness capabilities that automatically discover and map the relationships and dependencies between applications and the infrastructure components that support them. This means customers will be able to optimize infrastructure operations such as security management and disaster recovery based on application needs.

Applications: The vFabric Application Management Suite

The move to cloud computing and the increasing velocity of application demand are causing organizations to rethink how they develop and manage applications, driving the emergence of converged application operations models such as “DevOps.”  To help customers increase agility and improve application performance, VMware is introducing a new application management suite that will empower application ownersto deploy and manage a new generation of applications running on virtual and cloud infrastructures. 

The vFabric Application Management Suitewill include two new solutions that integrate application disciplines tounite and streamline developer and operations efforts. Together, these suites support an “active application management” approach that will help IT keep up with business demand for application changes and more effectively maintain application performance and availability in dynamic environments. vFabric AppDirectorwill standardize andautomate the release/deployment of applications to any cloud through easy-to-create blueprints with standardized templates, component libraries, and deployment workflows. vFabric Application Performance Managerwill help customers proactively manage application performance in virtual and cloud environments. The vFabric Application Management Suite is optimized for vFabric, but extensible to other frameworks.

The Business of IT: The VMware IT Business Management Suite

With the rise of public cloud services, the role of enterprise IT organizations is evolving into a broker of services to the business.  This shift requires better visibility into costs, service levels and vendor operations. VMware is introducing the IT Business Management Suite, which is based ontechnologies from VMware’s June 2011 acquisition of Digital Fuel,to provide the rigor and discipline CIOs need to optimize the business value of IT investments and communicate IT’s value in language the business understands. 

The suite will include three modules: IT Finance Manager, IT Service Level Manager and IT Vendor Manager.  Together, they will aggregate data from a wide range of financial sources and apply analytics and modeling to offer a single pane of glass into IT capital, operating and service expenses with meaningful metrics and reports.  The IT Business Management suite will allow CIOs to make informed sourcing decisions based on cost, risk, performance and compliance in order to operate as a broker of IT services in full alignment with business needs.

“Cloud computing requires a new way of thinking about the delivery of IT services,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner. “Automation is key not only to enable scale, but to keep pace with the rate of change in dynamic environments. And, as the infrastructure itself becomes programmable, management tools and processes must be updated to support an integrated, agile approach that spans across the IT divide.”