Like each year VMware saves some of the announcements for VMware Europe. Most are made at the US event.
VMware announced in Barcelona new releases of products part of its end-user computing and management portfolio:
- vCloud Automation Center 6.0 (general availability middle of November 2013)
- vCloud Operations Management Suite 5.8 (general availability middle of December 2013)
- vCenter Log Insight 1.5 (general availability middle of December 2013)
- IT Business Management Suite 8.0 (general availability middle of November 2013)
- VMware Horizon View 5.3
- VMware Horizon Mirage 4.3
At VMworld 2013 in the US we saw the release of a new vSphere feature called VMware AppHA. This allows to monitor a limited number of applications running on vSphere HA enabled clusters. If an application service has stopped AppHA can restart the service or in worse case, restart the VM. We are seeing VMware moving from delivering vSphere only monitoring solutions to going up in the stack to applications, as well as broaden the infrastrucutre monitoring supporting for example Hyper-V and cloud providers like Amazon AWS.
Goal of these new features is to provide IT departments with the right tools to become a Service Broker. Business leaders want agility. The cloud is used more and more to get agility. IT departments are evolving from a builder of services (keeping the lights on) to a broker of services. So vCenter is not just about vSphere anymore. IT needs tools to define what services are available, and how much they cost. Then there needs to be tools which enables a service to be provisioned either on-premises on in a public cloud.
At VMworld Europe VMware announced solutions which are built on three pillars: cloud automation, cloud operation and cloud business.
Log Insight was launched as a 1.0 product in July 2013. It is used to analyse logfiles. It handles unstructured data in a datacenter and complements vCenter Operations Manager. Log Insight is able to analyze logfiles from not only vSphere but also networking and storage devices. Log Insight uses content packs which contains predefined queries and knowledge about a specific component like a NetApp storage array for example.
New in 1.5 version is Active Directory support. Users of Log Insight can now authenticate using AD.
vCloud Management Suite wil have the new ability to monitor the health of applications. The 5.8 release is limited to monitoring Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server. Also new is analytics of the fiber channel storage and fabric. It is pretty easy to troubleshoot storage related issues. Hyper-V servers can be monitored as well now. Last but not least health and performance of Amazon AWS services can be monitored.