The word Awesome keeps coming up in my life. I have an 11 and an 8 year old so hearing this word is not that uncommon for me in my personal life. But hearing this word repeatedly in the context of work is a different matter. Where I keep hearing this word come up is around the new release of vCenter Configuration Manager (version 5.5) – a key component of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite.
I first started to hear this word from customers who were Beta testers of the release. Most of these were existing customers but we had some new customers as well. They included both Enterprise and Service Provider customers.
Next I started to hear this from our presales techs. Most were already familiar with the offering as a great solution for ensuring OS settings/configurations were properly set to meet regulatory compliance scrutiny for standards such as PCI and HIPAA. They were blown away to see how much we had added to the product in the 5.5 release to provide the virtual infrastructure team with the ability to both manage VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite configurations and to assess configuration compliance for the same across multiple vCenter and vCloud Director instances. Presales Techs are a tough crowd so hearing them say something like this about a new release is noteworthy.
Today, one of my colleagues told me that he presented in our Executive Briefing Center to the virtual infrastructure team of a very large bank from South America. They were already running 5.4.1 but wanted to get some insight into the latest release as well as a walkthrough of where we are going next with from a technology standpoint. Guess what word they used to describe what was shown to them around the 5.5 release? If you guessed “awesome” you would be correct. They decided right then and there that they needed to move immediately to the 5.5 release.
Check out the blog George Gerchow, Director of VMware’s Center for Policy and Compliance, wrote about the new release a couple weeks to better understand what I am talking about here. Also, be sure to check out the free compliance checker for vSphere and the free compliance checker for PCI 2.0. They will give you a very strong sense of how vCenter Configuration Manager can help you ensure that both your VMware Infrastructure and your guest operating systems are properly configured to meet everything from your own IT standards, to security best practices, to regulatory mandates. You can get the latest info on vCenter Configuration Manager here. Have an Awesome day!
David Jasso, Group Marketing Manager, vCenter Configuration Manager
