At this week’s VMworld Europe 2012 conference in Barcelona VMware announced several new and updated products to expand its cloud and virtualization management offerings. VMware’s new cloud management solutions build on the the software defined datacenter platform that they presented in their vCloud Suite 5.1 announcements at the previous VMworld 2012 held in San Francisco. The management of the cloud is the next layer of the virtual IT infrastructure and VMware’s new cloud management products simplify and automate management by enabling IT to manage services across heterogeneous clouds. VMware announced four products at VMworld Europe 2012 to enable cloud management:
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vCloud Automation Center 5.1 – An all new addition to the VMware product line-up, vCloud Automation Center 5.1 is based on the DynamicOps product which VMware acquired in June 2012. vCloud Automation Center 5.1 enables policy-based provisioning across VMware-based private and public clouds. It supports multiple hypervisors including Hyper-V as well as Amazon Web Services. vCloud Automation Center 5.1 will be integrated with VMware’s vCloud Director 5.1 and will allow authorized administrators, developers and business users to request new cloud services and applications or to manage existing resources using a self-service portal.
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vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 – The updated vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 uses analytics to proactively manage VM performance, capacity and configurations. It supports Microsoft Windows OSs, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, as well as Oracle and custom Java applications. VMware presented research showing that the vCenter Operations Management Suite increases efficiencies and provides a 59% costs savings as opposed to running vSphere standalone without the vCenter Operation Management Suite.
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vFabric Application Director 5.0 – vFabric Application Director has also been updated and it enables you to define and deploy multi-tier applications. The vFabric Application Director can deploy applications across multiple virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructures including VMware’s vCloud and Amazon’s EC2. The new release has been expanded to support all Microsoft packaged applications such as Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint as well as custom Java,.Net, Ruby on Rails applications.
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IT Business Management Suite 5.1 – Also updated for the 5.1 release, the IT Business Management Suite measures the performance and cost of cloud services and compares them to industry standards for over 3500 different metrics enabling organizations to place business values on IT operations.
VMware’s new cloud management solutions are expected to be available in Q4 2012. The vCloud Automation Center 5.1, VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 and vFabric Application Director 5.0 will be included in the VMware vCloud Suite. The vCloud Suite is licensed per processor. Prices start at $4,995 per processor
