Singing in most data centres usually isn’t forbidden, but it isn’t encouraged either.
But one could get away with humming. If Veeam Software had its way, administrators would be doing it to the tune of “the best things in life are free,”
That’s because the company has a lure for new customers for the Enterprise Editon of its just-released Management Pack 7 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, which provides reporting to Veeam’s flagshship Backup and Replication solution.
The pack collects information from virtual infrastructures and delivers it to the management suite.
This version adds support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, to go along with support for VMware.
Doug Hazelman, Veeam’s vice-president of product strategy, said in an interview that means customers will not only have visibility into either VMware or Hyper-V environments, they can also see into environments that have both.
Management Pack 7 comes in Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions — which adds more features — and is paid for by the socket.
The lure is that until the end of the year new Management Pack Enterprise Edition customers can get 100 free sockets, which Hazelman said works out to a list price saving of US$25,000. Or, he added, they can put the savings towards the Plus Edition.
New customers still have to pay annual support to get updates. In North America the Enterprise Plus edition costs US$450 per Hyper-V or vSphere CPU socket. The Enterprise edition is US$250 per socket and can be upgraded to Enterprise Plus for $200 per socket
Management Pack 7 adds other features as well, including
–Real-time Hyper-V performance metrics. Gives Hyper-V administrators detailed real-time insight into what is happening in their environment. Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V displays real-time memory and CPU consumption for the host and each associated virtual machine;
— Capacity planning for hyper-cloud, for calculating what would be required to move on-prem data to a cloud service. “You can select the portion of infrastructure you want to move, that application and everything associated, it will generate a report on what resources you need in Microsoft Azure or VMware vCloud Services so you can get a cost estimation,” Hazelman said;
–Host security profile reporting for VMware vSphere. If someone modifies the security settings on the host the report shows who changed the setting and when;
–Deployment of Management Pack data collectors for vSphere  has been automated, a boon for large VMware environments.
