Veeam Management Pack Continues Collecting Data During Failures

Veeam Software, Inc. announced its Management Pack (MP) v6.5 for VMware.

MP extends VMware monitoring, management and capacity planning to Microsoft System Center, providing visibility of physical and virtual infrastructures and applications from one console. With MP, IT can leverage its existing investment in Microsoft System Center to manage the vSphere environment from a management platform they use and know.

“We’ve spent the last seven years developing management and data protection solutions for the modern data center,” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO, Veeam. “More than 2,500 enterprise customers licensing more than 100,000 sockets depend on the Veeam MP to manage vSphere with Microsoft System Center, a management framework they already know and trust. And now that Veeam MP integrates with the No. 1 data protection solution for virtualization, Veeam Backup & Replication, customers can use that same console to manage their backup infrastructure.”

The new version of MP includes enhanced fault tolerance that eliminates single point of failure for monitoring. If vCenter goes down, MP v6.5 automatically fails over and reconfigures so that data will be collected directly from vSphere hosts. When vCenter is restored, MP returns to the default data collection method without interruption. Enterprise IT need never worry that a failure in their virtual environment will cause monitoring failure.

“Veeam Management Pack perfectly complements Microsoft System Center 2012, leveraging the benefits of health status, network topology, reporting and capacity planning. Veeam MP adds a ‘virtualization infrastructure’ component in distributed applications and provides an extra dimension in terms of SLAs,” said Jean-François Bérenger, services manager, Nextec Systems (Groupe Scala), Microsoft V-TSP MVP system center cloud and datacenter management

“Veeam Management Pack enables VMware environments to leverage the powerful range of Microsoft System Center tools including alerts of course, but also dashboards, performance monitoring, capacity planning and knowledge base – all within a single tool and free of agents. For customers using the VMware solution, this is an essential tool that will make daily operations easier and increase datacenter availability,” declared Hervé Thibault, system center team leader, Osiatis – Microsoft MVP – enterprise client management.

In addition, MP 6.5 integrates with Veeam Backup & Replication so that IT can manage the backup infrastructure directly from Microsoft System Center, unifying data center management in a single console. After MP discovers the Backup & Replication infrastructure, it can monitor an array of items including free disk space on proxy repositories, availability of WAN accelerators and backup proxies, and verification of VM restorability. It can also monitor the status of backup jobs running on backup servers, including performance metrics for backup jobs, with alerts for failure and duration and more.

MP v6.5 also provides new configuration tracking and alert correlation for all vSphere objects to show IT exactly what has changed within the vSphere environment. If a potential problem arises around resources or capacity, IT will have a graphical correlation of events to help pinpoint the cause.

“Once in a while you work on something which is so cool that you have to share it. For me, that’s Veeam MP,” said Cameron Fuller, corporate practice lead for system center, Catapult Systems LLC (a Veeam Gold ProPartner), and co-author of numerous books on Microsoft System Center in the Unleashed series. “The undersized and oversized reports in the Veeam MP are especially useful. By changing our allocation of resources, we were able to free up capacity and increase performance for systems which were under-resourced.”

European pricing for MP v6.5 starts at €440. A free, 30-day trial of MP with full functionality is available for download.