VMware yesterday released version 5.6 of its performance, capacity and configuration analytics product vCenter Operations Manager. The product which was first released in March last year, combines several products acquired by VMware in the past and is part of the vCloud suite, which besides vCenter Operations Manager also includes vSphere, vCloud Connector, vCloud Director, vCloud Networking and Security, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, vFabric Application Director, en vCloud Automation Center. vCloud Operation Manager functionality is partly available in the vCloud Advanced licensed suite and fully in the Enterprise version as detailed here.
vCenter Operations Manager provides performance, capacity and configuration analytics for management of highly virtual infrastructures and cloud infrastructures. It does so by analyzing and correlating data across the monitored IT infrastructure in a pretty unique way: for each tracked resource, it can identify the normal behavior of every metric (which implies a dynamic adjustment of thresholds) and then automatically recognize an anomaly. Capacity Management is provided to enable users to users to analyze, forecast, and plan the capacity needs of their virtual datacenter environment. Configuration and Compliance Management is provided by collecting, fixing, provisioning and managing configurations.
Version 5.6 provides the following new features:
- Support for vCenter Server 5.1 and ESXi 5.1
- Integration with vCenter Infrastructure Navigator providing application health monitoring and automatic application population in the Operations Manager interface
- Integration with vCenter Configuration Manager, allowing machine groups created by vCenter Configuration Manager to be automatically populated in the vCenter Operations Manager interface.
- Integration with vCenter vSphere Web Client
- Custom Groups, allowing user-defined and pre-defined custom groups
- Capacity Analysis enhancements
- Stress detection and computation improvements
- Context-sensitive explanations and next-step guidance for VM, host, datastore and cluster details.
- Experimental Custom Reports support
- User Interface enhancements
Information about installation and configuraiton of vCenter Operations Manager can be found here.