vSOM and VDPA Releases

In case you missed it, VMware released two interesting additions to the product portfolio last week.

vSOM – vSphere with Operations Manager

It became apparent that vCenter’s UI, while adequate for a lot of activities such as VM provisioning, does not provide the level of detail or forecasting required to manage large and complex infrastructures on a day to day basis. This is why VMware has introduced a new SKU which bundles the vCenter Operations product with vSphere. vCenter Operations Manager (vCOps) is the most comprehensive product for monitoring the health and performance of your virtual infrastructure. It  also monitors capacity & over provisioning and helps you to anticipate performance bottlenecks. Great to see it included with vSphere. Read more about it here and here.

VDPA – vSphere Data Protection Advanced

VDPA, as you might expect from the name, is building on top of VDP (vSphere Data Protection) which we released last year alongside vSphere 5.1. Scalability enhancements in the new VDPA include a larger store (up to 8TB) for storing deduplicated backup data and the ability to grow this store dynamically (in case you started out with a small store and now require a larger one). Another major feature, possibly the best feature of VDPA, is the ability to do backups and restores of Microsoft® SQL Server™ and Microsoft® Exchange Server™, both at the image-level and at the guest-level. Read more about VDPA here.