Vmware 2009 Products - information release
It would appear that some new products have appeared on the VMware product page under the “Coming in 2009 ” banner. Although these products were demonstrated at VMWorld 2008 in Las Vegas, they weren’t publicly announced through the usual communication channels, i.e. the customary VMware press release. They just seem to have appeared on the site !?
Credit to Stu over at Vinternals for the picture, my screen capture was rubbish in comparison.
The majority of the products listed above you will have heard of before such as Fault Tolerance, AppSpeed and VMSafe. The new ones that catch the eye are highlighted above with links to the introductory data sheets listed below.
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
VMware vCenter Data Recovery
VMware vCenter ConfigControl
Now unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to go to VMWorld 2008 in Las Vegas so never had the chance to see any of the demonstrations of the products. However I’ve seen some videos and had a quick look at the product information and as always have a few observations.
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
VAC partners have had access to the VMware capacity planner tool for some time now. One of the things that always frustrated me was that normal customers had no access to this tool. Customers would have to turn to products like PlateSpin PowerRecon in order to examine those “what if” scenarios that may require scaling up your virtual environment.
I like the idea of proactive capacity management, helping to combat the constant under and over provisioning you invariably get in virtual environments. Combine this with the capacity forecasting and your in a position to better utilise your current investments as well as budget better for future procurement. This is going to be a key factor in 2009, squeezing more out of what you got and only buying when absolutely necessary. Ahhh the good old credit crunch!!!
VMWare vCenter Data Recovery
I really like the look of this one and am presuming it is the VCB replacement. What I like about this over VCB is that it is a virtual machine deployed within your infrastructure, as opposed to the SAN attached windows storage server that was required for VCB. managing it all from the single interface that is vCenter is great news, slowly but surely vCenter is maturing into the centralised management tool it should be.
This is the one that I’ll be keeping an eye out for in the near future. Wondering what the licensing and pricing will be for this one, will it be free or is it intended as a competitor to products such as vRanger, Veeam backup and esxpress. One has to presume that full support for ESX 3.5i will be included as currently only vRanger does that, as announced on Eric Sloof’s blog post today
VMware vCenter Config Control
Not sure how much I can comment on this one as I don’t run that big a VMware environment so configuration control isn’t such an issue for me. That is until something goes wrong :o)
One area of Config Control that I have seen previously is host profiles, you can see a video demonstrating host profiles by clicking on the link.
Although it’s not to important for me, I can see how configuration control could be a massive issue in large scale environments. I’m thinking back to the VMworld 2007 talk that I saw on HSBC’s virtualisation setup in the UK and the sheer size of their implementation. Due to the current lack of configuration control software out there a lot of these companies have likely put in place strict processes and policies to govern configuration management. Will they need something like this in their setup? maybe not desperately but I’d imagine anything that can lessen the load on red tape and control processes will be welcomed with open arms. Depending on the price that is!!!
For those looking to do manual configuration control on the cheap could take a look at Hugo Peeters scripts on comparing ESX configurations with powershell. Credit to Duncan Epping for posting about this first
