System Center 'Concero' the Latest Management Blast
Virtualization and cloud management is hot. I get one press release after another from vendors in this area. Right now VMware and Microsoft are grabbing the headlines in an effort to carve out market share in this increasingly lucrative market.
Over the past few weeks, VMware made a couple of noteworthy announcements. The first was with vCenter XVP Manager and Converter, a plug-in that enables users to manage Hyper-V from a central console, and the second was vCenter Operations, a performance monitoring and capacity management tool.
I like the idea that I recently heard from Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst of Entelechy Associates, who suggested it might be a good idea for VMware to drop its hypervisor prices and make up for the revenue by competing more strongly and earning more money in the management market, where in Simon's words, "the real value-add is."
Moving onto Redmond, Microsoft has just taken its latest shot by boosting System Center in the spate of introductions that took place at the recent Microsoft Management Summit. Highlights included System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 beta, System Center Configuration Manager 2012, and a "sneak peek" at System Center "Concero."
Concero is Latin for "connected."
Delivered as part of a common management toolset for private and public cloud applications and services aimed at bolstering IT as a service, the new System Center 2012 offerings were created to help customers create and manage their private and public clouds based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V and other virtualization platforms.
"Concero provides a web-based and simple experience for the application owner who will be consuming cloud capacity," blogs Microsoft's Wilfried Schadenboeck. "Concero will enable customers to deploy, manage and control applications and services on private clouds built using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and in the public cloud offering of Windows Azure. This provides a consistent and simple user experience for service management across these clouds."
The list of top-line Concero feature includes access to resources across Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) servers, the ability to register and consume capacity from multiple Windows Azure subscriptions, and the ability to copy service templates and optional resources from one VMM Server to another. Other Azure-related features enable multiple users to be authenticated through Active Directory to access a single Azure subscription, and make it possible to copy Azure configuration, package files and VHDs from on-premises and between Azure subscriptions.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/31/2011 at 12:48 PM