Veeam Software

Release: Veeam nworks Management Pack for MSCOM 5.0

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today released version 5.0 of its nworks Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Smart Plug-in for HP Operations Manager.

The products allow customers to leverage their investments in Microsoft Operations Manager and HP Operations Manager to monitor and manage VMware vSphere virtual environments from within the enterprise management console already in place.

With version 5.0, Veeam has improved the operational aspects of the products for enhanced scalability and a lower total cost of ownership, all while remaining agentless on the ESX server. A new component called the nworks Management Center dramatically improves scalability, high availability and load balancing by managing multiple instances of the nworks Collector in large enterprise deployments. Expanded support for VMware vSphere and enterprise-class centralized administration ensure that these VMware Ready Optimized nworks solutions from Veeam are “future proofed” and optimized for the world’s largest enterprise deployments.

New features in version 5.0 include:

Full, native support for vSphere 4 – Preconfigured monitoring of new features in vSphere 4, including Distributed Power Management, Host Profiles and Virtual Applications (vApp).
New nworks Management Center – a new web-based administrative interface dramatically improves scalability, high availability and load balancing, and simplifies the deployment configuration and usability of multiple instances of the nworks MP and SPI throughout the enterprise.
High availability – the centralized license and configuration features of the new Management Center make it possible to create “hot standby” nworks Collectors. Any nworks Collector “heartbeat” failure automatically triggers redistribution of the failed Collector’s jobs to a standby Collector, assuring no lapse in monitoring availability.
Load balancing – in enterprises using multiple instances of the nworks Collectors, monitoring jobs are automatically assigned using the Balance feature, optimizing workload distribution and eliminating the need to configure individual Collectors.
License server – now a pool of licenses is shared across all enterprise instances of the nworks Collector, greatly simplifying deployment in large, dynamic environments.

The nworks MP and SPI from Veeam have both been qualified through the VMware Ready testing process and are certified as VMware Ready Optimized products. The nworks MP and SPI are VMware endorsed solutions for VMware management per the VMware Ready Management program, providing customer assurance that these Veeam products not only offer lower integration costs today, but also will support VMware infrastructure future directions.

The Veeam nworks MP and SPI 5.0 are both available immediately, with North American pricing remaining at $450 USD per socket for the MP and $690 USD per socket for the SPI.

Veeam Business View Released, Veeam Reporter Enterprise Updated

July 9, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Veeam Software recently made available a new add-on tool that works with other Veeam products to group, view and manage virtual machines based on criteria such as business unit, department, location, server purpose, or service level agreement. This alternate view of the VMware infrastructure supports chargeback and helps control “VM sprawl” by linking every virtual machine to a business service. At the same time, Veeam has updated its Reporter Enterprise product to enhance several reports and to integrate the new Business View capability.

Veeam Business View automates the use of VMware’s native custom attributes to categorize VMs. Business View also allows editing the attributes manually for one or multiple VMs at a time, or automatically based on pre-defined rules. For example, VMware administrators can define an automated rule such as “if a VM has retail in its name, add it to the Retail Banking category.”

Business View is integrated with Veeam Reporter Enterprise, the Veeam nworks Management Pack and the nworks Smart Plug-in. In the near future, it will also be integrated with Veeam Monitor and Veeam Backup & Replication. Business View is available at no extra charge for all current Veeam customers on maintenance.

Key benefits of Business View include:

Manage VMs from a business perspective – Group, view and manage virtual machines based on business criteria.
Prioritize resource allocation and utilization – Business View’s unique dashboard view allows administrators to see at a glance the number of VMs, vCPUs, amount of memory and storage used by each business unit, department, and server type.
Control VM sprawl – Business View helps control VM sprawl by categorizing virtual machines. Unassigned VMs and the resources they consume can be immediately seen on the web-based dashboard.
Define a chargeback model – Together with Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter Enterprise, Business View provides the flexibility to define a customized chargeback model. VM group information can be exported to a Microsoft Excel document for reporting or integration with other chargeback, inventory, or billing systems.
Integrate with existing VM categorization process – Customers already using custom attributes to group VMs by business unit, department, purpose, or SLA can automate and extend what they already have – no need to recreate everything from scratch.
Open architecture – Because Business View integrates with VMware vCenter data, customers can leverage the advantages of Veeam Business View with the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client and other third-party products. To reduce complexity, Veeam Business View comes with a built-in web service that allows any application to quickly query a specific category’s content directly from the Business View server, without putting any extra load on the vCenter server.

Veeam Business View is available immediately at no charge to all Veeam customers on maintenance.

Veeam Software Introduces New Essentials Bundle, Acceleration Kits for VMware vSphere 4

June 7, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today introduced new product bundles designed to pair with VMware vSphere Essentials for small office deployments and with the VMware Acceleration Kits for organizations of all sizes just starting out with virtualization.

The new Veeam Essentials bundle, available for resellers to license alongside VMware Essentials, is ideal for small business or remote/branch office locations. It includes six sockets of:

Veeam Backup & Replication
Veeam Reporter
Veeam Monitor

Additionally, Veeam now offers four editions of the Veeam Acceleration Kit, designed to help organizations of any size getting started with virtualization. These kits are limited to one per customer site.

The Veeam Acceleration Kit Standard includes either six or eight sockets of:

Veeam Reporter Enterprise
Veeam Configurator
Veeam Monitor

The Veeam Acceleration Kit Plus includes either six or eight sockets of:

Veeam Backup & Replication
Veeam Reporter Enterprise
Veeam Configurator
Veeam Monitor

At the same time, Veeam introduced a new policy with respect to support for the free edition of VMware ESXi. “As a longtime Premier Technology Alliance Partner and supporter of VMware’s product strategy, Veeam Software takes great pride in creating innovative software products that enhance the customer value of VMware ESX, ESXi, and ESXi Free,” said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam president and CEO. “One such example is support for the free edition of VMware ESXi in Veeam Backup and Replication.

For small or branch office environments, Veeam advises new customers to buy VMware vSphere Essentials and the new Veeam Essentials bundle. This combination costs exactly the same amount of money as purchasing six sockets of Veeam Backup at regular list price for use with free ESXi, and this option includes Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter, for even greater customer value.

The new Veeam bundles are available immediately, with North American pricing beginning at $1,995 for six sockets of Veeam Essentials; $3,150 for six sockets of the Veeam Acceleration Kit Standard; and $4,620 for six sockets of Veeam Acceleration Kit Plus.

Veeam Announces Enhancements To nworks Product Line

April 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software today made available version 4.5 of its nworks Management Pack (MP) for VMware for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and its nworks Smart Plug-in (SPI) for VMware for HP Operations Manager. Both products now use VMware vCenter custom attributes to offer the ability to segment VMware environments by line of business, SLA (service-level agreement) terms, or any categorization of the customer’s choosing. This allows customers to manage virtual machines in accordance with their criticality to business needs, and to group virtual machines for management by department or location.

Version 4.5 of both products also includes significant enhancements in scalability and performance. Veeam developers, working closely with VMware’s scalability lab, enhanced the nworks Collector version 4.5 to support larger VMware environments and reduce vCenter processing requirements. A single Collector now supports more than twice as many ESX hosts and virtual machines as before, with far less performance impact on the vCenter server. With this breakthrough in scalability and performance, enterprise customers gain operational efficiency while monitoring their ever-growing virtual environments.

The nworks MP and SPI from Veeam have both been qualified through the VMware Ready testing process and are certified as VMware Ready Optimized products. This key designation from VMware validates the Veeam products as being architected and tuned for VMware Infrastructure, as well as for the next-generation VMware vCloud. The nworks MP and SPI are VMware endorsed solutions for VMware management per the VMware Ready Management program, providing customers assurance that these Veeam products not only offer lower integration costs today but also will support VMware Infrastructure future directions.

The Veeam nworks MP and SPI 4.5 are both available immediately, with North American pricing remaining at $450 USD per socket for the MP and $690 USD per socket for the SPI.

Veeam Debuts New Versions Of Reporter And Reporter Enterprise Products

March 25, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software, award-winning provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today delivers new executive management reporting, integration with corporate CMDBs (change management databases), new change management capabilities, and numerous technical enhancements in version 3.5 of its Veeam Reporter and Veeam Reporter Enterprise products. Veeam Reporter is a favorite of virtualization consultants and systems integrators for documenting customer engagements. Veeam Reporter Enterprise is ideal for documenting large ESX and ESXi environments over time for capacity planning and chargeback.

New features in Reporter Enterprise 3.5 include:

Executive Management Reporting — documentation of the virtual environment looks better than ever, with new Visio diagram formats, new pre-defined reports, and a new ability to create and save custom report templates, including corporate logo and formatting.
CMDB Integration — provides integration of the VMware environment into common configuration management processes by exporting data into an existing centralized CMDB. Reporter Enterprise 3.5 provides a new PowerShell Extension to run scripts to automatically export Virtual Infrastructure data (both for the current state and earlier points in time) into a company’s centralized CMDB. This eliminates the manual work of creating inventory spreadsheets, and keeps the central CMDB up-to-date automatically. In addition, running PowerShell scripts against the Reporter Enterprise server instead of vCenter allows users to offload script processing activities from vCenter, providing for better availability of this critical Virtual Infrastructure element.
Change Management — because Veeam Reporter Enterprise gathers virtual infrastructure data periodically on a scheduled basis and stores it in a central Microsoft SQL database, administrators can see point-in-time views or generate reports to analyze changes over time for configuration drift, security auditing and troubleshooting. In addition or instead of that, administrators can simply opt to receive an e-mail with all changes to the virtual infrastructure since the last data collection.

Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.5 is available immediately, with North American pricing at $375 USD per socket.

Veeam Expands Partner Program

February 12, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware ESX host environments, today announced the next phase in its ProPartner program, with added benefits and opportunities for VMware VAR partners in 2009. Basic, Silver and Gold partner levels have been defined, with increasing benefits and opportunities at each level.

At the same time, Veeam has completed the integration of partner programs from nworks, which Veeam acquired in 2008. Veeam and former nworks partners are organized into a global two-tier distribution network to better serve end user customers seeking to back up and recover, report and document, monitor performance, plan capacity and control VM sprawl, manage configuration and change, and otherwise manage VMware infrastructure.

In addition, Veeam announced that its partner network now has more than 1,400 ProPartners worldwide. Partner benefits include up to 65% additional revenue and margins for every VMware ESX deal.

Veeam’s ProPartner levels include:

Gold ProPartner – by invitation/approval. Requires at least one VMware certified professional (or equivalent HP or Microsoft designation) on staff. Benefits include NFR keys, internal-use licenses, marketing programs, deal registration, access to the ProPartner portal, and use of the Gold ProPartner logo to designate this elevated partner status.
Silver ProPartner – requires approval by regional channel management team. Benefits include NFR keys, internal-use licenses, marketing programs, access to the ProPartner portal, and use of the Silver ProPartner logo.
Basic ProPartner – provides any other VAR or reseller who wants to quote or sell Veeam products with access to the ProPartner portal and a starting point to begin working with Veeam.