VMware announced a strategy and a new solution to simplify and automate how IT organizations manage services in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. VMware vCenter Operations will help customers transform IT operations to achieve the agility and economics of cloud computing.

vCenter Operations will be tightly integrated with VMware vSphere, understand its advanced infrastructure management functionality and be able to collect data from its underlying physical components (servers, storage, network) as well as other management tools within the enterprise. It will then analyze the millions of data points these systems produce in real-time to get to the information that matters and visually present it in a simple, actionable way through dashboards.

This means infrastructure and operations teams will have the intelligence they need to make fast, informed operational decisions in order to:

Proactively ensure service levels in dynamic cloud environments
Real-time performance dashboards with patented analytics and powerful visualization of the health of the environment will allow IT to proactively pinpoint performance issues and risks before they become problems and impact SLAs.

Get to the root cause of performance problems faster
The combination of patented analytics and infrastructure-awareness will allow vCenter Operations to more accurately and rapidly determine symptoms so that infrastructure and operations teams quickly get to the root cause of performance problems. By enabling a more collaborative approach, vCenter Operations can speed problem resolution and change management cycles and reduce manual efforts by 40 percent.

Optimize deployments in “real-time” to enable self-service provisioning
vCenter Operations will provide real-time analysis of performance and capacity to help teams make fast, informed decisions on deployment. This capability will be critical to enabling rapid and reliable provisioning needed in self-service environments.

Maintain compliance in the face of constant change
Automated provisioning and configuration analysis will ensure optimal configuration by automatically detecting configuration changes and enabling rollback to help IT maintain continuous compliance with operational best practices and industry or regulatory compliance requirements.

vCenter Operations Pricing and Availability

vCenter Operations is designed as a set of products and solutions that will bring together the performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities VMware has developed and acquired, including VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager and Integrien Alive. vCenter Operations will be available in three editions to meet the needs of customers managing both VMware vSphere-virtualized and physical environments.

* vCenter Operations Standard offers performance management with capacity and change awareness for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.

* vCenter Operations Advanced adds more advanced capacity analytics and planning to vCenter Operations Standard’s performance management for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.

* vCenter Operations Enterprise offers performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments and includes customizable dashboards, smart alerting and application awareness.

The first versions of these editions will be available in late Q1 with prices starting at $50 per VM. vCenter Operations will be available through VMware sales and via VMware’s more than 25,000 channel partners.