VMware debuts datacentre automation suite
VMware has rolled out a suite of products designed to automate datacentre tasks and manage service-level agreements.
The launch of the vCenter Product Family, announced on Monday, kicked off the company's VMworld 2009 conference, which runs in San Francisco this week.
The vCenter products are designed to work in tandem with the company's vSphere cloud-computing operating system.
In a nutshell, vCenter is designed to automate tasks such as datacentre provisioning, monitoring, and change and performance management. VMware said that vCenter will also manage foward policies and service-level agreements. Each virtual server that is deployed will operate to a specified service level.
The vCenter family includes AppSpeed, which manages service-level reporting for virtualized applications; CapacityIQ, which manages the capacity levels of virtual machine resources and datacentres; and ConfigControl, which checks compliance and configuration states. Other management tools are Site Recovery Manager, which automates disaster recovery tasks; LifeCycle Manager, which automates virtual machines from provisioning to retirement; Chargeback, which allocates infrastructure costs; and Lab Manager, which aims to ease development, quality assurance and pre-production environments.
The vCenter applications will be sold per processor. Most of the vCenter family will ship in 2010, the company said.
Also on Monday, the company announced VMware Go, a free beta service that aims to get small and midsized businesses using virtualisation tools quickly. VMware Go is a web-based service that will walk customers through installation and setup of ESXi, the company's free hypervisor, which allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on a single server. Customers will be able to give the online service the IP address of a physical server which will then be configured and have its updates managed by the service, according to VMware. The VMware Go beta started on Monday, and the product will be generally available in the fourth quarter, VMware said.