VMware and EMC Ionix IT Management Solutions
IT management processes must change as more of the infrastructure is virtualised and organisations embark on the journey to deploy private clouds. Traditional tools and processes that were designed for siloed, static physical infrastructures do not provide the automation and control needed for inherently dynamic virtualized environments and cloud infrastructures.
VMware and EMC Ionix solutions simplify how IT is managed, accelerating IT service delivery, increasing operational efficiency, automatically assuring compliance, and reducing business risks.
Recent studies have found that 77% of IT budgets are being spent on operational costs for existing systems, i.e. keeping the lights on. This leaves only 23% of budgets for delivering new capabilities. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager highlights how new technology not only provides infrastructure and power savings from virtualising servers. Significant operational savings are made by the tools to automate processes that were once complex, in this case disaster recovery.
Highlighted below are some of the solutions from VMware that span physical and vitual environments and enable the journey to cloud computing.
VMware IT Management Solutions
VMware Virtualization and Cloud Management (PDF – 362KB)
Infrastructure and Operations Management
VMware vCenter Operations uses patented analytics and powerful visualizations to automate performance, capacity and configuration management. It collects and analyzes performance data, correlates abnormalities and identifies the root cause of building performance problems. VMware vCenter Operations provides capacity management to optimize resource usage and policy-based configuration management to assure compliance and eliminate sprawl and configuration drift.
Comprehensive Visibility
Powerful visualization of performance, capacity and configuration issues and risks enable visibility into dynamic infrastructure and applications for rapid problem resolution.
| ■ | vCenter Operations provides cross team views for real-time performance, capacity and configuration management. | |
| ■ | Performance data is abstracted to Health, Workload and Capacity Risk measures that allow IT to efficiently identify building performance problems with less effort. | |
| ■ | Out of the box templates to ensure continuous compliance with security best practices, hardening guidelines and regulatory requirements. | |
VMware Operations Management Suite
Intelligent Automation
Patented analytics provide actionable intelligence across the stack to automate manual processes for maximum efficiency and agility.
| ■ | Infrastructure and operations analytics eliminate time consuming problem resolution processes through automated root cause analysis. | |
| ■ | On-demand analytics allow optimization of the IT infrastructure without “Tribal Knowledge”. | |
| ■ | Capacity analytics eliminate the need for spreadsheets, simple scripts and rules of thumb. “What If” capacity planning scenarios don’t require time-consuming model updates. | |
| ■ | Capacity analytics allow identification of over-provisioned resources so they can be right-sized to make more efficient use of compute power. | |
| ■ | Automated provisioning and configuration analysis detects unwanted changes and helps IT maintain continuous compliance with operational best practices and regulatory. | |
VMware vCenter Operations Enterprise vCenter Dashboard
Proactive Management
An integrated approach to automating operations allows IT to be more proactive and ensure optimal performance in the face of growing service level expectations and accelerating change.
| ■ | Self-learning performance analytics identify building performance problems before they affect end users. | |
| ■ | Identifies capacity shortfalls before they affect end users. | |
| ■ | Real-time, integrated dashboards of performance, capacity and configuration change events allow a proactive management approach and help ensure SLAs are met. | |
| ■ | Assures compliance with policy control across all aspects of the datacenter infrastructure, virtual or physical. | |
VMware vCenter Operations Enterprise Application Dashboard
IT Business Management
VMware (formerly Infra) Service Manager is a 100% web architected solution for the automation of IT Service Management. VMware Service Manager is independently verified to the highest level of ITIL compatibility for Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management, Service Level Management and Availability Management.
VMware Service Manager has a well-established customer base in Australia. Many clients have used VMware Service Manager for over ten years and it has been a key enabler in their successful adoption of ITIL best practice.
Organisations with a high level of ITIL maturity are finding that changes in their data centre are increasing the need for more sophisticated Change and Release processes. Virtualization projects have been the catalyst to convince IT management that further investments in tools and automation is required.
VMware Service Manager Process Model
Self Service Portal and Service Catalog
The Service Catalog provides a communication and translation mechanism enabling IT to articulate the value that their activities provide to the business through the medium of IT Services. IT and the business must work together to identify the set of offerings published to the Service Catalog, ensuring they are aligned to business objectives. This is achieved by explaining the characteristics of these offerings in language that both the business and IT can understand. VMware Service Manager is able to measure and manage the Service Level Agreements, Availability, Cost, Support and Orchestration of IT Services.
Efficiency is achieved by enabling the business to directly request IT Services through the use of a Self Service Portal. VMware Service Manager workflows and interfaces can be utilized to automate repetitive tasks at the service desk such as service requests requiring updates to Microsoft Active Directory.
Service Catalogue Portal Automation
ITIL and IT Process Automation
VMware Service Manager provides the link for the automation of processes between business units, the Service Centre and IT Operations. As well as support for ITIL processes organisations are looking to automate activities like the provisioning of equipment and software. The combination of a powerful workflow engine, integration platform and custom development capability make VMware Service Manager an ideal platform for automating and streamlining IT service delivery.
VMware Service Manager ITIL Process Support
Application Management
VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager provides the automated, real-time application discovery and dependency mapping capability you need for effective, dependency-driven change, configuration, incident and problem management across physical and virtual environments.
Application Dependency Mapping
Map Applications Quickly, Accurately via Agentless Discovery
Through Application Discovery Manager’s agentless, continuous dependency mapping - across physical and virtual application infrastructures - you can quickly gain an understanding of your service dependencies with unparalleled accuracy and efficiency. Whether you are moving a data center, virtualizing applications, building a site recovery plan or moving a service to the cloud, an accurate application dependency map is an essential first step.
Service Dependencies identified through an Application Dependency Map
Virtualize Business Critical Applications with Confidence
Application Fingerprints™ uniquely identify common packages and applications. In addition, Application Discovery Manager’s heuristic fingerprinting recognizes common n-tier application interactions and automatically groups and maps these applications, which allows enterprises to quickly classify their applications. A user can also specify a grouping of hosts that make up an application and then discover all instances of that application and related hosts in the environment. Alternatively, deep-packet inspection can discover patterns within the discovery process—such as URLs and database table names—to allow the creation of new fingerprints around these patterns for ongoing discovery of application instances.
Eliminate Reliance on Tribal Knowledge
Application Discovery Manager provides a real-time, automated dependency mapping solution that allows enterprises to drive quick and accurate application virtualization and data center blueprinting projects. It eliminates reliance on “tribal knowledge” and guesswork, helps IT teams avoid change-induced service outages, degradations and failures and populates third-party or homegrown CMDBs or CMSs. Enterprises can detect, log and report on software and hardware configuration changes and compare configurations server to server. External database reporting capabilities provide the ability to create customized reports based on the data in Application Discovery Manager’s repository. Operations teams can quickly determine what changed and track down the truth behind the all-too-common statement: “I didn’t change anything.”