Blog post by Mike Fegan
There were a lot of exciting announcements this year at VMworld 2012. One announcement that stuck was the release of vSphere 5.1 which has further simplified the IT transformation journey for the small to midsized business (SMB). As I consult with customers daily about options and ways to address IT challenges and help develop a roadmap to a more simplified and agile IT environment, it was great to see the enthusiasm and recognition by the SMB audience for this vSphere 5.1 announcement and the ways this will address your needs. I wanted to share this with you asap!
vSphere 5.1 includes amazing features, such as: vSphere Replication, vSphere Storage Appliance, vCenter Data Protect, and vShield Endpoint. This means that with every acceleration kit customers get everything they need to virtualize and can gain the benefits of shared storage without having to purchase a SAN. Benefits include data replication for DR, VM backup with file-level restore and anti-virus off-load. We will dig into these features in more detail in future posts but for now I want to focus on a new acceleration kit announced with the 5.1 release; vSphere 5.1 with Operations Management.
The vSphere 5.1 Standard with Operations Management acceleration kit takes simplifying the journey to the next level by combining vSphere Standard with the capabilities of vCenter Operations Manager and vCenter Protect to pro-actively manage and protect your infrastructure. With these tools in place you will be able to quickly track down problems, properly plan for capacity, patch both physical and virtual machines, know what software is installed on your desktops, stay in compliance with licensing, automate common IT tasks, and much more. Let’s talk a little more about these two products and illustrate the benefits.
vCenter Operations Management
Instead of spending 30 minutes to an hour every morning with your morning health-check, you can simply pull up the vCenter Operations Manager interface and quickly understand the health of your environment and move on to other tasks/projects. In addition to the operational health, you gain the benefit of understanding your current capacity and utilization. You’ll be able to identify how much longer you can operate on your current compute resources, understand how well you are provisioning your VMs, and get recommendations on right-sizing your over-provisioned VMs.
vCenter Protect
Now that you have reduced the time it takes to check the health of your environment, what about patch management, asset inventory, and the ability to automate common IT tasks? vCenter Protect allows you to do this and extends beyond the virtual infrastructure allowing you to also manage your physical assets. vCenter Protect is an extremely straight-forward approach. The installation is intuitive and minutes after installing, vCenter Protect will discover all of the machines in your organization and provide you with a list of missing patches. vCenter Protect goes beyond other patch management products by allowing you to address not only Microsoft related products, but common 3rd party applications as well, such as Adobe Reader, Flash, Mozilla, and others. In addition to patch management, vCenter Protect also collects an inventory of applications, allowing you to run a report on applications installed on your machines to ensure you are in compliance with licensing.
vSphere 5.1 with Operations Management = Turn-Key solution for every business
In summary, we’ve extended the capability of vSphere with this 5.1 release enabling you with more functionality and value to virtualize your infrastructure, protect your data with a robust backup solution, and enhance DR with integrated, host-based replication. To further simplify your IT journey, vSphere 5.1 with Operations Management is a turn-key solution that provides you everything you need to confidently manage your infrastructure. vCenter Operations Manager keeps you updated on the health of your virtual infrastructure and simplifies capacity planning. vCenter Protect creates a straight-forward approach to managing your physical and virtual assets. These two amazing products coupled with all of the built-in features of vSphere 5.1 provide a cost-effective and extremely powerful solution that will benefit customer environments of all sizes.
Thoughts?
Based on what you just read, which features are you most excited about? Can you see how vSphere Replication can assist you with your current DR project? Do you see the benefits of being able to proactively manage your infrastructure and plan for the future? I welcome your comments and questions below!
Mike
Get to know Mike – Read 10 Questions With… Mike Fegan
