VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today general availability of vOperations SuiteTM 4.5. Designed to provide new automation capabilities for virtual machine management, the new release introduces advanced VM management task automation which coupled with robust automation controls, offers data centers “trusted automation”. The new version 4.5 of the vOperations Suite (also referred to as vOPSTM) is currently available for download at http://www.vkernel.com.
Growing VM Environments Generate an Increasing Volume of Management Tasks
Adequately operating a virtual machine requires undertaking regular management tasks for each VM. Virtual machines must be monitored for performance issues, reviewed for proper resource sizing and reported on for stakeholders to gain insight into health status. Manually executing any of these management tasks – and for each VM – is time-consuming. As environments grow, administrators begin to spend increasing portions of their week engaged in manual execution of these routine tasks.
As a result, the only way to support scaling virtualized environments is to increasingly implement automation to eliminate manual VM management or hire additional system administrators. For example, a VM administrator can manually delete approximately 60 abandoned VM images in one hour. With vOPS 4.5’s ability to automate deletion of abandoned VM images, an unlimited amount of files can be removed in seconds. The need for automation becomes particularly acute for cloud deployments, which are purposefully architected to remove manual steps from VM life cycle operations.
“As a managed service provider for the rest of the business, automation of tasks is critical to maintain low operating costs,” says Chris DiGanci, Senior IT Manager, PEER1 Hosting. “VKernel vOPS 4.5 delivers practical automation steps that we can tailor to our environment and will save my team member a significant amount of time.”
Effective VM Management Automation Fulfilled in vOPS 4.5
VM management automation has been introduced in vOPS 4.5 to vastly streamline recommendation execution. For automation to be truly successful, it must allow for:
“Out-of-the-Box” Functionality that Saves Significant Time – vOPS 4.5 requires only a click-of-a-button, eliminating the need for manual work in a VM management console which can take hours or days. Users can also adjust settings for different infrastructure areas.
Trusted Automation – vOPS 4.5 features robust control features for automation capabilities that allow virtualization administrators to automatically execute VM management tasks and set “trusted automation” for their environments. With vOPS 4.5, administrators can automatically: delete abandoned VMDK files, merge VM snapshots, solve VM performance issues, power-off Zombie VMs, resize vCPU and VM memory resources based on recommendations, update management dashboards in real-time in external systems, and calculate CPU, memory and storage requirements at any point in the future.
“As organizations continue to deploy more virtual machines, data center staffs are spending a growing percent of their time engaged in routine management tasks,” said Bernd Harzog, The Virtualization Practice. “To avoid significantly growing data center headcount as they scale, virtualized environments will have to begin to employ automation of management tasks to oversee growing VM counts.”
Additional Features
Other features available in vOPS 4.5 include:
- Application type tags to denote which application is running inside a virtual machine
- Storage DRS and storage cluster support available with VMware vSphere 5
- Access to VMware VASA interface storage statistics available with vSphere 5
- Capacity planning calculation adjustments for vSphere 5 HA methods
- Improved support and visibility into Raw Device Mapping (RDM) storage objects
- Additional management reports such as graphs for performance issue counts
- Auto-set VM metric trend alarms that generate warnings when abnormalities are detected
“As our customers experience growth within their own organization, one thing we’ve learned is they have become overwhelmed with executing tedious management tasks,” says Bryan Semple, CMO, VKernel. “vOPS 4.5 directly addresses that pain-point and allows for simple to implement and easy to maintain automation.”
General Availability
VKernel vOperations Suite 4.5 is available now for a 30-day trial from http://www.vkernel.com. The Japanese version of vOPS 4.5 will be available in Q1 2012. Pricing starts at $299 per socket per application.