VMware attempts to turn sprawl into cloud

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 08 March 2011 18:12

Business IT - Technology

The first of the VMware vCenter Operations suite of tools, which has been designed to allow organisations which have a virtualised data centre to start operating it more like a private cloud, will be released this month.

Currently in beta, the tools will provide IT managers with better visibility into the hardware in their virtualised data centre, and will eventually be joined by systems which will allow for improved  applications and end user computing management. The system will be integrated with VMware's vSphere which is designed to deal with resource allocation and load balancing.

Michael Warrilow, senior manager products and solutions, for VMware in Asia Pacific said that; 'Most analysts would say the virtualisation journey becomes the private cloud. So how do you do operations management in the cloud era?'

Clearly VMware's hoping users will use the vCenter Operations suite to do just that. The tool features a dashboard which can track workload, 'health' and capacity of the virtual environment. It is also intended to help IT managers deal with so called virtualisation sprawl.

The system can provide transparency of operations down to individual virtual machines, allowing data centre managers to reconfigure or decommission virtual machines as required.

Mr Warrilow added that the tool allowed managers to develop a 'heat map' which would identify where machines were not being fully utilised, allowing them to be redeployed or decommissioned. 'Our customers are demanding this - it's a necessary step to continue the journey toward private cloud,' he said.

VMware already sells tools which allow enterprises to charge their users according to their systems users, although Mr Warrilow acknowledged that was not yet widely deployed. It was however attracting the interest of enterprise chief financial officers he said.

Prices for the new suite of tools will start at $50 per virtual machine monitored.