As virtual infrastructure (VI) within the data center becomes a focal point of management from a business imperative operations management end, it is important to ensure all of the underlying hardware components that have impact on the performance of virtual machines, and the applications hosted on top of these, are integrated into the VI operational tools.
Domain expertise is typically best left for those vendors who have deep customer experience such as Fibre Channel switching, SAN storage, purpose built firewalls, and/or multi-path data center routing. Conversely customers cannot afford to play swivel chair between non-integrated domain operations tools especially when they have business critical outage conditions. These outage conditions are now measured in minutes; outage’s longer than 10 minutes usually means someone’ s job is at risk.
We are expanding our partner reach within our growing cloud automation and operations product portfolio, to include ecosystem partners. This expansion is designed for leveraging their domain expertise, while integrating this expertise into a common set of deep domain Management Packs that offer a unified environment for proactive problem detection, health, capacity and performance management.
As a proof point Brocade and VMware have just completed the vCenter Operations Manager Management Pack with Brocade Networks. This plug-in imports a rich set of Fibre Channel topology data, including customized visualization, and problem alerting into vCenter Operations Manager. 
As storage performance is often the major problem affecting the health, risk, and/or capacity of virtual machines, integrating Brocade SAN switching data into vCenter Operations Manager significantly enhances the operations reach while reducing the mean to identification and repair. . VMware will be co-hosting a joint webinar with Brocade on November 19th per the following details.
Also please see Brocade’s blog as they provide additional detail regarding this integration with vCenter Operations Manager.
