Veeam Software, a provider of data protection, disaster recovery and systems management solutions for VMware virtual datacenter environments, on Tuesday announced support for VMware vSphere 4.1. The first Veeam product to leverage the new functionality in vSphere 4.1 is Veeam Monitor 5.0, an easy-to-deploy, framework-independent solution for real-time monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning of VMware environments. A beta version of Monitor 5.0 is available today for download. All commercial Veeam products will support vSphere 4.1 this quarter.

“We truly value our business relationship with VMware and are pleased to support their newest release,” explained Ratmir Timashev, Veeam President and CEO. “It’s exceedingly important to Veeam and to our customers that we remain on the forefront of VMware innovation.”

vSphere 4.1 includes several enhancements of particular interest to Veeam customers. “Many of our customers have VMs on NFS shared storage,” said Doug Hazelman, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam. “They’ve been asking for more statistics on NFS and will be pleased that this data is in now available in the vSphere API and, by extension, in Veeam Monitor. NFS is no longer a ‘black box’ or something they have to monitor separately.

“Memory compression is another area that customers tell us they’re excited about,” Hazelman continued. “And with Monitor 5.0, they can quantify and document the savings they achieve with memory compression on ESX(i) hosts and individual VMs.”

Key Features

Key features in Monitor 5.0 include:

• Full support for vSphere 4.1: Not only is Monitor 5.0 compatible with vSphere 4.1, it also makes use of the new performance metrics in vSphere 4.1 and monitors new vSphere 4.1 capabilities such as memory compression.
• Built-in intelligence: Monitor 5.0 provides more than 100 pre-defined thresholds and alarms to alert VMware administrators of potential performance problems. It also includes a comprehensive knowledge base that explains each alarm, with possible causes, suggested resolution and links to external sources of additional information.
• Dashboards: Monitor 5.0 includes a dashboard for each object in the virtual infrastructure tree, proving an at-a-glance view of the most useful information for any object, with easy drilldown to more detailed information, as required.
• Other new features include monitoring of logical disk space, snapshot monitoring and Infrastructure Overview reports that provide management-level reports for any part of the virtual infrastructure. Monitor 5.0 also includes streamlined alarm management, enhanced scalability and architecture improvements.