At VMworld® 2013 Europe, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced new capabilities and 
enhancements across its portfolio of cloud management solutions to simplify and automate management of IT services for multiple clouds and platforms. New product releases introduced today include VMware vCloud® Automation Center™ 6.0, VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite™ 5.8, VMware IT Business Management Suite™, and VMware vCenter™ Log Insight™ 1.5. In addition, VMware will update the automation and management capabilities of VMware vCloud® Suite 5.5, recently introduced on August 26, 2013.
For IT to keep pace with business demands, stay relevant and deliver IT services with agility, it must transition from being builders to brokers of IT services,” said Ramin Sayar, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management, VMware. “VMware cloud management solutions enable IT to deliver this agility while standardizing and ensuring governance and control — whether the goal is to better manage a highly virtualized environment, build a vSphere-based private cloud, extend to the hybrid cloud or broker services across many providers.
As IT organizations evolve into brokers of IT services, they can rely on VMware cloud management solutions to enable key aspects of IT as a Service including:
On-demand access to any service: To help meet the expectations of immediate access to services, IT can increase agility and deliver infrastructure, application, desktop and custom services on diverse platforms and clouds with a common governance framework to simplify and control how services are consumed.
Cost transparency: By providing transparency into the cost of VMs, infrastructure services and the use of shared resources, IT can help end users make informed decisions about the cost of services across private and public clouds, increasing accountability and efficient use of resources.
Automated operations: Managing IT services today requires management solutions that are tightly integrated, leverage big data analytics and are purpose-built for the dynamic nature of the software-defined data center. This approach provides proactive management and unprecedented operational visibility of the performance and health of applications and underlying virtual and physical infrastructure, including storage and networking.
Multiple clouds and platforms: VMware cloud management solutions support heterogeneous hypervisor and physical environments and multiple clouds, providing customers increased automation, with a unified management approach and freedom of choice and flexibility.
“Customers around the world rely on Orange Business Services’ best-in-class communication, infrastructure and business critical application solutions to power their businesses,” said Axel Haentjens, vice president, Marketing & International, Orange Cloud for Business. “To drive greater value from its cloud, Orange Business Services uses VMware cloud management solutions to automate rapid service delivery as well as operations management, thereby increasing agility as well as resource utilization and efficiency.”
VMware Cloud Management Boosts Automation, Heterogeneous Support and Financial Visibility
The new product capabilities across VMware’s comprehensive management portfolio reinforce VMware’s commitment to provide industry-leading solutions that are tightly integrated with VMware vSphere® while offering customers freedom of choice to run services on diverse platforms and across a hybrid cloud. Today VMware introduced significant enhancements and a new offering across its cloud management product portfolio:
vCloud Automation Center 6.0 – Delivering business agility through IT automation
VMware vCloud Automation Center provides the agility customers need by automating the delivery of personalized IT services. The new release of VMware vCloud Automation Center will offer customers a single solution for the rapid delivery of applications, including application release automation and support for DevOps automation tools, through the incorporation of VMware vCloud Application Director. The product will feature a self-service catalog for requesting and managing all types of IT services providing customers with on-demand access to any service and reducing time to value.
VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 will enable customers to design any custom IT service in minutes (such as Hadoop-as-a-Service), to complement current out-of-the-box service capabilities for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS). Further extending its multi-platform and multi-cloud capabilities, VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 will introduce support for VMware vCloud Hybrid Service™, VMware NSX™ and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack-based cloud environments.
Learn more about what’s new in vCloud Automation Center 6.0.
Read what partners are saying about vCloud Automation Center 6.0.
vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 – Automated operations management for the mobile cloud era
The VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite provides automated operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management. The new release will offer enhanced performance analytics for business-critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. In addition, VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 will introduce analytics for a broad range of storage vendors and devices to help administrators pinpoint configuration errors, resources issues and performance bottlenecks. New monitoring dashboards delivered out of the box provide deeper visibility into applications running on Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon Web Services.
VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 will enable IT organizations to standardize on a single operations management platform designed to enable higher quality of service, operational efficiency, control and compliance across all applications and services running on virtual, physical and cloud environments.
Learn more about what’s new in the vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8.
VMware IT Business Management Suite – Transparency into cost and quality of IT services
The VMware IT Business Management Suite provides transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services, enabling CIOs to align IT with business priorities. Today, VMware introduces VMware IT Business Management Suite 1.0 Standard Edition, a new addition to the VMware IT Business Management Suite. Targeted at the head of infrastructure, this solution will allow infrastructure and business stakeholders to quickly understand the cost and consumption of their virtual infrastructure across private and public cloud environments through integrations with VMware vCenter Server™, VMware IT Benchmarking™ and VMware vCloud Automation Center. The solution will also enable the comparison of internal costs with those of public cloud providers offering similar infrastructure services.
VMware IT Business Management Suite 8.0 Advanced and Enterprise editions will introduce additional persona-based dashboards tailored to the unique needs of the CIO, CFO of IT, IT project managers and line-of-business owners. This latest release will also feature native integration with VMware IT Benchmarking, allowing enterprises to continuously compare the cost of their services against industry peers and companies with similar operational characteristics.
Learn more about what’s new in the VMware IT Business Management Suite.
vCenter Log Insight 1.5 – Automated Big Data log analytics to simplify root cause analysis
VMware vCenter Log Insight delivers real-time insights and monitoring of data from applications, virtualized infrastructure and physical hardware to help improve operational efficiency and minimize costs and troubleshooting time. Integration between VMware vCenter Log Insight and VMware vCenter Operations further enables organizations to combine and analyze both structured and unstructured data for end-to-end operations management. New VMware vCenter Log Insight capabilities will ease adoption in enterprise environments and enable rapid time to value. Optimized for VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5 will also simplify the use of content packs developed by partners, allowing for increased visibility into the logs of infrastructure software and hardware commonly found in virtualized and cloud environments.
Learn more about what’s new in vCenter Log Insight 1.5.
VMware Business Continuity Solutions Increase Uptime, Decrease Complexity and Minimize Cost
Improving Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery continues to be the No. 1 reason why customers virtualize1.Protecting data is key to any business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. VMware partnered with EMC to deliver VMware vSphere Data Protection, a backup solution that optimally addresses the challenges of SMBs and midsized organizations. Today, VMware also announced VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced, introducing capabilities spanning assured recovery, increased efficiency and greater scalability:
vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced – Efficient and simple backup and recovery solution for VMware vSphere
Powered by EMC Avamar, VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced delivers industry-leading storage-efficiency for backups, unique capabilities to accelerate recovery and unparalleled integration with VMware vSphere. VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced will feature new capabilities including network-efficient backup data replication, integration with EMC Data Domain, a new Microsoft SharePoint agent, and automated backup verification. Customers will now benefit from disaster recovery protection, enhanced scalability and global deduplication with EMC Data Domain, and granular, application-consistent backups for Microsoft SharePoint.
The built-in backup data replication capabilities of VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced will enable partners in the VMware Service Provider Program to deliver backup to the cloud services. SunGard will be the first service provider to introduce backup and disaster recovery services for both VMware vSphere Data Protection and VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced customers to replicate data to the SunGard cloud.
Read what partners are saying about VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5 Advanced.
VMware Cloud Management Marketplace
VMware has released VMware® Cloud Management Marketplace, a one-stop destination for trusted management solutions from VMware and its industry leading partner ecosystem. Customers can browse, download and try management solutions from industry leading vendors. These solutions, available in a service catalog setting, streamline the provisioning process, and are built in partnership with VMware using open and extensible product interfaces and implementation SDKs.
New Cloud Management Services
Today, VMware also announced new professional services to help customers outline the strategy and technology roadmap to define and implement cloud management and automation solutions. The new Cloud Automation Design and Deploy service focuses on policy-based automation, enabling customers to build cloud management infrastructure for improved time-to-project completion, operational reliability and efficiency. Enhanced VMware Accelerate Advisory Services help organizations evaluate the value of cloud operations and cloud business management solutions within their IT environments, mapping out a plan for current and future business requirements.Learn more about VMware Professional Services.
Pricing and Availability
VMware’s enhanced cloud management solutions are expected to be available in Q4 2013. VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5 is now available for download via a public beta program today at: http://bit.ly/log-insight-beta-15
VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 and VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 capabilities will be included in VMware vCloud Suite 5.5, which is licensed per processor starting at $4,995.
Read the VMware vCloud Suite Pricing and Packaging whitepaper
Go to VMware vCloud Suite Editions/Buy page
The VMware IT Business Management Suite is licensed per user. For more information, visit: Go to VMware IT Business Management Pricing/Buy page.
VMware vCenter Log Insight is priced at $200 per operating system instance with no log data size limits. Go to VMware vCenter Log Insight Pricing/Buy page.
VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 and VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 will also be available a la carte and priced per VM. Go to VMware vCloud Automation Center Pricing/Buy Page. Go to VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Pricing/Buy Page.
VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced 5.5 is expected to be available in Q4 2013, and is priced at $1,095 per processor with no restrictions on number of protected VMs per license. Go to VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced Pricing/Buy page.
