Veeam ONE Boosts Virtualization Management Capabilities

Saying that existing systems management software products for VMware are inadequate, Veeam Software has announced Veeam ONE, which performs trend analysis, resource optimization, hardware provisioning planning and what-if modeling. Compared with competing products, Veeam ONE makes recommendations for server and storage upgrades to address upcoming capacity shortfalls, instead of just predicting them.

At the same time, the software can examine how storage resources are allocated to virtual machines, preventing storage overprovisioning, the company says. Other features include chargeback, change management and configuration management, as well as a number of other areas of VMware management.

Kevin Stephens, an infrastructure specialist with the Ohio State Department of Developmental Disabilities, which is beta-testing the product, says its capacity planning capabilities have been useful to his organization. The department has converted more than 90 percent of its servers to virtual during the last two years. "We were starting from scratch, without a load or the impact of an existing virtual environment," he says. "We didn't know what the theoretical maximum would be."

While VMware and other vendors had some capacity planning capability, "this new one, from what I've seen, actually gives you more detail about why it is your environment would fail, what environmental resources are lacking, and gives you clear resources you can take to your management: 'This is "what if" and what happens,'" he says.

The Columbus, Ohio-based Veeam, which is known for its virtualized backup and replication software for the VMware environment, has always focused on virtual management, compared with other systems management vendors that first specialized in physical systems, says Ratmir Timashev, CEO and founder. He said that this announcement is an attempt to catch up with VKernel, which added performance analysis functionality to its VKernel Capacity Management Suite software earlier this year. However, the Veeam product line covers a number of other management areas, as well as capacity planning, he says.Users have been finding there is a great deal of pain when it comes to managing performance, predicting capacity and being able to manage movement in a virtualized VMware environment, says Milind Govekar, a research VP at Gartner, adding that he expects the company to support the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor in the future. The new product takes Veeam from the traditional area it was in, backup and recovery, and moves it to more of a performance monitoring area, he says. In particular, the product will be attractive to small to midsize businesses because of its pricing, he adds.

The software is slated to be available for download in May as a free upgrade to existing customers. The company's products in general cost $550 per socket, compared with VMware, which costs $500 per virtual machine.

In a virtual environment, pricing by the socket tends to be significantly cheaper than pricing by the virtual machine. Stephens says the pricing model made it look more attractive for his organization than competing products because, as an existing Veeam customer, it would be free.

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