News

Update for Veeam Management Pack Adds Support for Hyper-V

The release is integrated with System Center Operations Manager.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 07/25/2014

Veeam has extended its management capabilities to handle Microsoft virtualization.

While previous versions of the Veeam Management Pack only supported VMware, the new v7 release now provides common visibility and management of Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor. Administrators can use the Veeam Management Pack from within System Center Operations Manager.

Anticipated for a while, Veeam had demonstrated a near-ready release at the TechEd conference last May, among other System Center Operations Manager management packs. Within System Center Operations Manager, the new Veeam Management Pack version 7 for System Center offers a common dashboard that provides monitoring, capacity planning and reporting for organizations using Veeam Backup & Replication.

With the new management pack, System Center Operations Manager administrators can manage both their vSphere and Hyper-V environments together with complete visibility to physical and virtual components and their dependencies. In addition to offering deeper visibility into both hypervisors within a given infrastructure, the new Veeam Management Pack provides contextual views using color-coded heat maps for viewing various metrics. It also provides real-time data feeds.

It also lets administrators manage the Veeam Backup & Replication for Hyper-V platform, among other things determining if, and when, a host or virtual machine (VM) is at risk of running out of storage capacity. "We provide views on networking, storage, heat maps -- the smart analysis monitors, as we call them," Doug Hazelman, the company's vice president of product strategy, said during a meeting at TechEd. "This is something you don't see in general in System Center."

If memory pressure is too high on a specific VM, the Veeam Management Pack can analyze environmental factors like host metrics, the properties of the VM and whether it's configured with too little memory. While administrators typically default to the Windows Task Manager to gauge utilization of CPU, memory and other common resources on a physical server, Hazelman said that it’s not designed to diagnose VMs. The Veeam Task Manager addresses that.

The new release has two licensing options. The Enterprise Plus Edition provides complete real-time forecasting, monitoring and management of the entire infrastructure, including clusters and the complete virtual environment. It’s available as a free update to existing Veeam Management Pack 6.5 customers.

The basic Enterprise Edition is a scaled-down release which  provides management and monitoring, but not the full level of reporting of the Enterprise Plus version. The company is offering 100 free cores of the new Enterprise Edition free of charge, including maintenance for one year. The offer is good through the end of this year.