The demand on today's IT department is daunting. More and more small and midsize size businesses (SMB) are using the "do more with less" philosophy. Because of this, IT Professionals are finding themselves wearing more hats than ever before. Furthermore, with a smaller IT staff it can become extremely difficult to be proactive or even track down an issue that is affecting production.
Virtualization has helped with consolidation of the server infrastructure, but now you may be faced with managing a large number of virtual machines (VMs). So, how are SMBs with a small IT staff expected to handle these new challenges?
Tool Belt With Tangible Benefits
vCenter Operations Manager has the tools to support the under-staffed IT department. Instead of tracking down log files and manually measuring metrics, vCenter Operations Manager does this all for you, allowing you to focus on deploying resources to more proactive, strategic solutions and planning. Have an application performance issue? Identify it immediately with the "Health Badge". Health is measured on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being bad and 100 being good (pretty easy, huh?). You can see from this image that the overall health of our environment is OK. It's not quite 100, so if you dig just a little deeper you can tell that this particular cluster is bound by memory.
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Concerned about your capacity? From a single view you can quickly determine how long you can continue to run or how many new VMs you can deploy with your current hardware resources before having to add new servers. You can see in the example below that based on current usage we have more than a year before we need to add hardware resources. Additionally, with our current capacity we can add approximately 460 VMs.
[http://blogs.vmware.com/.a/6a00d8341c328153ef0176164ed39d970c-500wi]<http://blogs.vmware.com/.a/6a00d8341c328153ef0176164ed39d970c-pi>
Now, lets just say you're "Time Remaining" is less than a year and "Capacity Remaining" shows that you can only add 5-15 new VMs. What do you do? There's always the option of asking for budget to purchase more hardware, or you can be a hero and look into reclaiming capacity from overprovisioned VMs. As you can see below, we have a lot of reclaimable capacity! We've provisioned way more vCPUs and vRAM than we need for these VMs. With this information at your fingertips you can quickly identify ineffeciencies and increase your consolidation ratio making better use of your existing hardware infrastructure.
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Simple Install to Boot!
vCenter Operations Manager is a snap to install. It's delivered as an .OVF template. From your vSphere client, simply choose "Deploy OVF Template"; follow the simple wizard and the analytics server starts analyzing your environment immediately.
In summary, vCenter Operations Manager is the tool that allows the smaller IT departments to "do more with less." You're virtualized. And by cost-efficiently adding breadth with this tool you can quickly identify operational issues, minimize the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot an issue, plan for the future, significantly increase your consolidation ratio, and allow your IT team to focus on more strategic projects and end-user support.
Want to learn more about vCenter Operations Manager?
* vCenter Operations Introduction Video<http://bit.ly/LcTS24>
* VMware vCenter Operations Manager Getting Started Guide<http://bit.ly/OVMSai>
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Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/07/mikefegan_vcenterops.html
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