Posted by Rob Smoot
Sr. Director, Product
Marketing
At EMC World this week, VMware and EMC announced a joint solution that extends vCenter Operations Manager to provide a single view of virtualized infrastructures built on VMware vSphere and EMC VNX series storage. I’m pretty excited about our partnership with EMC and wanted to let our customer community know what we’re doing and why.
First, the why. What problem are we trying to solve? Think of the traditional division of responsibilities between server and storage administrators. Today’s virtualized environments are so dynamic that split decision-making leads to poor performance, capacity planning, and utilization. The reason is obvious: neither group has all the necessary information about the infrastructure and they can’t effectively coordinate their activities fast enough to meet service levels—or the expectations of users. Plus, troubleshooting across siloes is a time-consuming, frustrating nightmare. What’s needed is a unified approach.
And that’s just what this solution provides. The secret is the new EMC VNX Connector for vCenter Operations that feeds VNS storage metrics and customized dashboards into vCenter Operations Manager. This rich stream of information, combined with vSphere deep integration, gives vCenter Operations Manager complete visibility and understanding of the full virtual environment—servers, network and storage. A good fit for any size enterprise that uses VNX storage, the solution scales up for large cloud environments that are especially dynamic and difficult to manage.
vCenter Operations Manager offers a number of features that help administrators stay in control. They receive notifications of issues and can take steps to keep the infrastructure running at optimal capacity and efficiency—before problems occur. Customizable dashboards continuously update health, risk, and efficiency scores, providing end-to-end visibility into virtualized environments and cloud operations. Troubleshooting gets easier, too, because vCenter Operations Manager delivers actionable performance analysis that accelerates the resolution of performance and capacity problems.
But what distinguishes vCenter Operations Manager from other management tools is how it implements proactive monitoring. It actually has self-learning capabilities—powered by a rich set of patented algorithms—that learn the behavior of the infrastructure and set dynamic thresholds accurately. That means far fewer false messages and more reliable information for decision-making.
vCenter Operations Manager is continuously updated to show current scores for health, risk, and efficiency.
There’s a lot more that I could say, but here’s the bottom line: VMware vCenter Operations manager, with EMC VNX Connector for vCenter Operations, delivers full cross-domain visibility and eliminates operational silos across the virtual and physical infrastructure for VNX-based environments. And that translates directly into rapid problem resolution, optimal resource utilization and superior end-to-end performance. A future blog will talk about real-world uses. Meanwhile, post your thoughts and questions about the joint EMC-VMware announcement.