During its annual VMworld Europe which was held in Kopenhagen last week, VMware made some announcements around 3 cloud management suites. Firstly vCenter Operations, and introducing two new suites titled vFabric Application Management Suite and IT Business Management Suite.
Firstly they announced an update for vCenter Operations, which VMware released in March this year. The update for vCenter Operations will provide more integration with vCenter Capacity IQ and vCenter Configuration Manager, new dashboards and several other enhancements, and is expected to be released in Q1 next year.
The first new suite announced was the vFabric Application Management Suite which will contain two products, vFabric AppDirector and vFabric Application Performance Manager.
vFabric AppDirector is an application provisioning solution which will standardize and automate the release/deployment of applications to any cloud through easy-to-create blueprints with standardized templates, component libraries, and deployment workflows. The product is optimized for vFabric components. Deployment changes are automatically published to vFabric Application Performance Manager.
vFabric Application Performance Manager will help customers proactively manage application performance in virtual and cloud environments. The products driven by VMware vFabric AppInsight provides application operations dashboards that automatically models transactions across all application tiers, providing a critical real-time perspective on the true performance of dynamically scaling applications.
When performance problems do occur, powerful visualizations and drill-down details, such as correlated metrics on resource performance from VMware vFabric Hyperic and byte code instrumentation make it easy to identify root cause and take actions at the code level to fix problems quickly—all within a single management console. The vFabric Application Management Suite is also optimized for vFabric, but extensible to other frameworks.
The 2nd Suite announced was the IT Business Management Suite, the product purpose is to provide visibility into the costs, utilization and Service Levels of IT Services.
The IT Business Management Suite contains the following 3 Software as a Service (SaaS) products:
IT Financial Manager, automatically and continually tracks the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), unit costs and their associated breakdowns. It can identify top spenders and consumers of all IT Services, analyze and compare IT efficiency ratios and spot ongoing potential cost saving strategies.
IT Service Level Manager, enables tracking, setting, reporting and analyzing of IT performance and value measures, like Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Operations Level Agreements (OLAs) and more. IT Level Manager does this for all services, vendors and customers. It can also perform root cause and business impact analysis, create what if scenario’s and generate monthly service reports and booklets and more
IT Vendor Manager, provides a control mechanism for vendor agreements to govern contractual commitments. It also provides tracking, managing and validation of invoices and credits and earn backs which map to performance and value delivered by these vendors.